“Her Last Word Was Repeated Again and Again” – Auto-Intertextual Ideas About Women in Isak Dinesen

Brian de Graft

July 2015

Student Number: 10185283

MA Thesis, English Literature and Culture

Supervisor: Prof. Henk van der Liet Table of Contents

1. Introduction………………………………………………………………………….2

2. The Works 2.1 The Essays………………………………………………...... 5 –2.1.1 “On Mottoes of My Life”…………………………………………………….... 5 –2.1.2 “Daguerreotypes”…………………………………………………….…………7 –2.1.3 “Oration at a Bonfire, Fourteen Years Late”………...... 12 2.2 Seven Gothic Tales………………………………………………………………….16

3. Types of Women……………………………………………...... 18

4. The Relationship Between Man and Woman………………………………………...24

5. Feminism and the “Emancipation of Woman”……………….……………………....29

6. The Symbolic 6.1 The Importance of Symbols………………………………………………………...33 6.2 Women as Symbols……………………………………………………...... 38 6.3 The Power of Suggestion – Women and Their Clothes………………...... 40 6.4 Women as Art……………………………………………………………………..... 42

Conclusion.…………………………………………………………………………..…..45

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………...47

1 Chapter 1 – Introduction

Understanding Isak Dinesen is an ongoing process, not a task that can be completed. Part of the pleasure of reading Isak Dinesen is the prospect of stumbling across something new. Her tales can profitably be read over and over again. (Brantly 11)

I have chosen to begin this thesis with the above quotation, taken from Susan C. Brantly’s introduction to her book Understanding Isak Dinesen, because it provided me with motivation while faced with the challenging task of contributing, in an original way, to the body of work surrounding an author who has already received a considerable amount of academic attention. Countless books and articles have been dedicated to the life and work of this author who, even though she was close to fifty when her first book Seven Gothic Tales (often abbreviated to SGT from now on) was published in 1934, managed to become one of the most important authors of the 20th century. With scholars who have devoted years of their lives trying to provide us with a better understanding, and appreciation, of Dinesen’s work, “stumbling across something new” academically, as opposed to personally, is not an easy task. However, Dinesen’s tales, which “have been described as puzzles, labyrinths, three-dimensional space, and multi-layered texts embedded with clues to be discovered upon each rereading” (Brantly 11), are so rich and complex that what we can extract from them will never be exhausted; truly an ongoing process. And indeed, when I myself stumbled upon what I believe to be an exciting characteristic of Dinesen’s literature, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this particular aspect of Dinesen’s work has received little to no critical attention. The discovery was that many of the ideas expressed in Seven Gothic Tales can be found in essays that she wrote later on in her career, which were then (posthumously) published in a collection entitled Daguerreotypes and Other Essays (mostly abbreviated to DG from now on) in 1979. Albeit subtly (and perhaps unconsciously by the author), Dinesen’s non-fictive essays refer intertextually to what she has already expressed in her fictive short stories. After briefly providing the necessary context, I shall elaborate on this discovery and its consequent treatment throughout this thesis. When I first proposed to write my thesis about the work of Isak Dinesen to the examination board of the University of Amsterdam’s English literature department, it was declined on the grounds of it being Danish, and not English, literature. This rejection was, of course, unfounded: “Out of loyalty to her dead lover’s language” (Arendt vii), Dinesen wrote most of her work in English first, and would then generally translate – or rather recast1 – the text into her first language, Danish. Therefore, even though she counts as one of Denmark’s most valuable exports regarding its literary tradition, her arguably most important contribution has been to that of the English-speaking world2.

1 “Recasting” is probably a more suitable word for what Dinesen did to the English texts because, rather than simply translating them from one language to the other, she would use the opportunity to add, and make minor changes to, the text (Brantly 2). 2 Once I had explained this to the examination board, I was granted the permission to go ahead with the thesis. This, apart from being a great relief, strengthened my ambition to increase

2 The idea for this thesis first came to me while I was reading Dinesen’s essay “Daguerreotypes” shortly after having read Seven Gothic Tales. In this essay, Dinesen describes four types of women: the guardian angel, the housewife, the prostitute (or bayadère as she puts it delicately) and a final, unofficial type: the witch. The descriptions and examples given for each of these types of women reminded me so heavily of one particular character from one of the gothic tales that I had to return to this story to make sure I was not mistaken. Upon rereading the story I was sure: in the second of the seven tales, “The Old Chevalier”, Nathalie, at different times throughout the story, clearly embodies each of the four types. “The Old Chevalier” was published, along with the other six gothic tales, in 1934 – seventeen years before the publication of Daguerreotypes. What this tells us, then, is that the ideas regarding these four different types of women had been apparent to, and expressed by, Dinesen before she describes them in her essay. This realisation inspired me to closely read her book of essays and then again the gothic tales in order to see whether this discovery was a one-off, or if there were more such examples of recurring ideas to be found. What I found was what I had hoped for: many ideas and themes that had been embedded within Dinesen’s gothic tales, albeit subtly, come back, more explicitly, in her essays. Even though a comprehensive overview of all of Dinesen’s auto-intertextual references throughout her career would be ideal, for obvious reasons of time and space an attainable scope of research must be determined for this thesis. Therefore, I have decided to limit the sources I will be analysing and comparing to the following: Seven Gothic Tales will be compared to the three essays from Daguerreotypes and Other Essays that I found the most relevant for my objective. These essays are “Daguerreotypes” (1951), “Oration at a Bonfire: 14 Years Late” (1953), and “On Mottoes of My Life” (1960), the contents of which I will briefly lay out in the upcoming chapter. In addition, the research is limited to Dinesen’s most recurrent subject, one that obviously gave her a lot to think and write about: woman. Though it is a subject I will touch upon, this is not a feminist reading of Dinesen’s work, but rather an exploration of the ideas and opinions expressed on women, and womanliness, in a broader sense. After an overview of the works in chapter two, chapter three will focus on Dinesen’s description of the four types of women already mentioned. Chapter four will examine Dinesen’s words on the relationship between men and women. In the fifth chapter, what Dinesen writes about feminism and the emancipation of women will be discussed. Finally, the sixth chapter will first establish Dinesen’s extensive use of symbols, and then go on to examine how she applied these to her descriptions of women. This will include her descriptions of women as symbols, the symbolic significance of women’s clothing, and women as works of art. Together, these chapters will help me establish an overall proposition on what Dinesen wishes to convey to her readers regarding women and womanliness.

people’s awareness of this great author, especially within the English literature field, in which Dinesen often seems overshadowed by her native-speaking contemporaries (Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to name a few).

3 Concerning my methodology: even though I will not be using a strict research method, my analyses can be referred to as close readings of the texts. Julien D. Bonn’s Comprehensive Dictionary of Literature defines close reading as follows: “Interpretation begins with close reading. In this process, you note specific uses of language, such as imagery, symbols, repeated terms, patterns of expression, the tone of the speaker, and the main ideas [themes] the writer introduces. Whether it takes the form of writing, discussion, or silent observation, it should be based on a careful questioning of the text” (31-32). This will include bearing in mind that I will be comparing a work of fiction with works of non-fiction. Though interpretative, I will attempt to make my research as unbiased as possible by supporting it with facts and relevant academic sources whenever possible. In the final years of her life, Dinesen wanted dearly to create a book called Albondocani: a work with countless interlocking tales, linked by the common protagonist Albondocani. Even though she never managed to realise this dream, “Dinesen’s entire oeuvre is connected by a network of allusions, so, in a sense, one might argue that she actually completed Albondocani” (Brantly 4). I agree with Brantly and, with this thesis, wish to aid the academic world in mapping this Albondocani.

4 Chapter 2 – The Works

2.1 –The Essays

In order for the readers of this thesis to (re)familiarise themselves with Dinesen’s essays, I will now provide a brief overview of the main points expressed in each of the three essays. I feel as though a sound understanding and memory of the essays’ contents will make the upcoming analyses and comparisons a lot clearer, especially because I will be referring to certain parts of them extensively. With her many anecdotes and digressions, it sometimes becomes difficult to understand the essence of what is written by Dinesen in the essays. Therefore, an overview of these essays, which comprise a lesser-known part of Dinesen’s oeuvre than her fictional tales, seems like a helpful addition to this thesis.

2.1.1 – “On Mottoes of My Life”

“On Mottoes of My Life” was initially published in The Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1960. Dinesen begins by reflecting upon a question she was asked by an interviewer a while ago: whether or not she could sum up her life’s experiences in what is called a motto. About the idea of a motto, Dinesen then writes:

The idea of what is called “a motto” is probably far from the minds of young people today. As I look from the one age to the other, I find this particular idea–the word, le mot, and the motto–to be one of the phenomena of life which in the course of time have most decidedly come down in value. To my contemporaries the name was the thing or the man; it was even the finest part of a man, and you praised him when you said that he was as good as his word. (Dinesen, DG 1).

She then goes on to describe how her generation, the older generation, is much more accustomed to living in a world of symbols than younger people; whereas her generation sees a symbol of power while observing a flag, a younger person might see “a length of bunting, of such and such measurements and such and such colors, and worth so and so much a yard.” (Dinesen, DG 2). Similarly, enterprises, epochs and tasks were christened with mottoes, which were then lived by as if they were sacred (Dinesen, DG 3). Mottoes could have such profound influences on families who lived under them that a family with Amore non vi (love without force) as their motto were a lot more peaceful than those who claimed Nobilis est ira leonis (the lion’s anger is noble). In Africa, Denys Finch-Hatton gave her the nickname “The Great Emporor Otto”, for he “could never decide on a motto” (Dinesen, DG 3). Growing up, one of Dinesen’s mottoes was Sicut aquila juvenescam (I shall grow up as the eagle), which she partly picked for the beauty of the actual words. However, her first real motto came to her whilst studying art in Copenhagen at the age of seventeen: Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse

5 (Sailing is necessary, living is not) – a motto that seemed especially suitable since she grew up by the sea. This is a quotation is from Pompey, who is said to have uttered it to his sailors when they refused to set sail from Africa to Rome one stormy night. Essentially, it means that one if there is something that must be done, one should simply do it regardless of the possible outcome; Dinesen would be “sailing straight into life” (Dinesen, DG 6). Under the motto “It is necessary to farm, it is not necessary to live”, Dinesen and her husband, her cousin Bror Blixen, purchase a coffee farm in British East Africa in 1913. The family of Denys Finch-Hatton – the man who Dinesen fell in love with after meeting him in 1918 – had Je responderay (“I will answer”) as their motto, and Dinesen, with Finch-Hatton’s permission, adopted it as her own, her second, motto. Dinesen gives two reasons for taking on this motto. Firstly, it was the “high valuation of the idea of the answer in itself. For an answer is a rarer thing than is generally imagined – There are many highly intelligent people who have no answer at all in them” (Dinesen, DG 7). In Africa, however, she became one with her native companions, the landscapes, animals and other human beings, all of which answered her (life’s calling) in a way unknown to her before coming to Kenya. The locals accepted her and she and her husband received native names: Wauhauga, the wild geese. Later on, Dinesen would be known within the colony as “Lioness Blixen” (Dinesen, DG 9). She feels “very sure that, to a woman at least, the presence of echoes in her life is a condition for happiness, or is in itself a consciousness of rich resources. I advise every husband: answer your wife, make her answer you.” (Dinesen, DG 9). Acknowledging, and being in harmony with, your fellow man and your surroundings is therefore of the utmost importance. The second reason for choosing this motto was because of its ethical content: “I will answer for what I say or do; I will answer to the impression I make. I will be responsible” (Dinesen, DG 9). Dinesen then writes that she finds it sad that some people, when entering distant colonies, feel that they can leave behind their sense of responsibility and code of behaviour; one should always be accountable for one’s own behaviour and actions. However, when in 1931 the coffee farm had to be sold and Dinesen returned to Denmark, she was silent; there was nothing left to answer to. Dinesen did, however, need to make a living, and had already written two of her gothic tales – “The Roads Round Pisa” and “The Monkey” – in Kenya before returning to Denmark to live with her mother, who was loving but “never quite realised that [she] was more than fifteen years old and accustomed, for the past eighteen years, to a life of exceptional freedom” (Dinesen, DG 9). During this rather desperate time living with her mother, Dinesen’s third motto came to her. One day she was reading the newspaper and saw an article about the boat of a French scientific expedition that had gone down near Iceland. The boat’s name was “Pourquoi pas?” (“Why not?”) . This would become her motto while writing her book of gothic tales. Even though it seemed paradoxical and she could not pinpoint exactly why she found strength in this motto: “ “Why?” by itself is a wail or lament, a cry from the heart; it seems to bring in the desert and to be in itself negative, the voice of a lost cause. But when another negative, the pas, the “not”, is added, the pathetic question is turned into an answer, a directive, a call for wild hope” (Dinesen, DG 12). In times of doubt this motto, acting like “an exacting and joyful

6 spirit” (Dinesen, DG 12), helped Dinesen finish Seven Gothic Tales and stands over not only this book but all her work – that which she has already written and that which is still to come. Dinesen’s last motto came into her life “very quietly, without chasing out Pourquoi Pas?, as if by a law of nature, like the change of the seasons, which no one really wants to alter” (Dinesen, DG 13). This motto is the following: “Be bold. Be bold. Be not too bold”. She goes on to writes that:

A person who all through his life, like Mussolini, had declared: “Non amo I sedentari”–“I do not like sedentary people”–“will recognise the moment for choosing a chair and settling down in it, trusting that “trees where you sit will crowd into a shade”. The craving to impress your will and your being upon the world and to make the world your own is turned into a longing to be able to accept, to give yourself over to the universe. Thy will be done (Dinesen, DG 13)

After this, she writes that she herself has lived a strong, long life, at times feeling a “kinship with Odysseus” (Dinesen, DG 14). And now, being weak in her old age is, according to Dinesen, “the natural continuation of the vigor of former days” (14). What Dinesen seems to suggest, then, is that one should lead a bold life, but know when to step down and let nature run its course; even the strongest must one day learn to accept their own mortality. Dinesen ends the essay with a short tale that a friend had once told her, in which a Chinese Emperor is given a ring with an inscription that should be read in times of danger, doubt and defeat: “This, too, will pass” (Dinesen, DG 15). Dinesen then adds that the “sentence is not to be taken to mean that, in their passing, tears and laughter, hopes and disappointments disappear into a void. But it tells you that all will be absorbed into a unity” (Dinesen, DG 15).

2.1.2 “Daguerreotypes”

Unlike the majority of her work, Dinesen’s essay “Daguerreotypes” was first written in Danish and published in Denmark in 1951 under the title “Daguerreotyper” – she later translated this into English herself. As Amanda Langemo, a reviewer of the book Daguerreotypes and Other Essays aptly puts it, the essay “quotes opinions of a bygone era, thereby contributing knowledge of cultural history for better understanding and deeper appreciation of present attitudes and ideas” (Langemo 291). It is an elaboration of a talk that she gave on the radio at an earlier time and decided to write down, because “not everything said in conversation can endure the severe test of being made immortal and subjected to criticism”, and that she will now ask her “readers to imagine they are [her] auditors” (Dinesen, DG 16). In this essay, she gives us two daguerreotypes; memories from days long gone. Dinesen gives two reasons for naming her essay “Daguerreotypes” (the word itself coming from Louis Daguerre, a Frenchman who, in the nineteenth century, invented one of the earliest types of photograph, the daguerreotype). The first reason is that “old pictures were in no way art, nor did they

7 pretend to be. They were content to be faithful representations of reality” (Dinesen, DG 17). Unlike paintings, daguerreotypes show things, as they actually are, not how things are supposed to be. Instead of providing us with a photograph, however, Dinesen will provide her readers with a “reproduction of [people’s] ideas and concepts and their view of life […] as they were” (Dinesen, DG 18). The second reason is that, like the daguerreotype, which was first presented in 1839, the ideas that she will present us with are old and antiquated. Because of this, she writes:

Therefore, I cannot be personally responsible for the pictures I shall show you any more than someone three thousand years ago could have been responsible for the daguerreotypes. In this matter, as in others, I subscribe to Goethe’s remark, “He who cannot account for three thousand years lives only from hand to mouth” (Dinesen, DG 18)

With this, Dinesen stresses the importance of being aware of one’s past; without knowledge of the past, one cannot fully understand, and appreciate, the present3. She then goes on to describe how things change over time. For example, an article of clothing that has not been worn by its owner for years can suddenly seem too short, or too long. The piece of clothing itself may not have changed, but how we perceive it has changed; this is how fashions and trends work. Another example is that a photograph of a woman who is believed to be extremely modern can be taken, and years later, people will laugh at what was once considered beautiful. A year-old hat is “démodé” (out of style), whereas one that is two- hundred years old is “antique” and a cherished piece of history; the way we see the past is relative and dependent on the developments that have occurred since then.

When one is sufficiently beyond fifty years of age to have been old enough, fifty years ago, to understand that people were saying; and if one then lived with and listened to old people, one then received intimately and orally views of life which were developed and matured a hundred years ago. So one can – as I now can – intimately and orally transmit century-old ideas to the youth of a new era. (Dinesen, DG 20-21)

According to Dinesen, therefore, transmitting ideas and information from one generation to the next is not only valuable, but also essential for the human condition. She writes that we, as human beings, maintain that if a man is “devoid of experience or an overview of life he really doesn’t know who he is” (Dinesen, DG 21-22). Therefore, in order for us as readers to better understand who we are, Dinesen provides us with accounts of how things were in the past; she is adding to our cultural memory. Now that her intentions have been established, Dinesen goes on to write her first daguerreotype. This first daguerreotype is about the time that, when Dinesen was still a young girl, the brother of her father, Court Chamberlain Dinesen of Katholm, made a certain remark one evening when the Dinesen family was gathered around the table after dinner. He remarked that he could not stand to see females on bicycles: ““When I see a lady riding a bicycle it seems to me I damn well have the right to

3 Dinesen also distances herself from accountability for what is written, as will be discussed further on in this thesis.

8 warm her bottom!”” (Dinesen, DG 24). Upon this, one of Dinesen’s two older female cousins replied: “”Well, there’s no way you can do that, uncle, for in the first place she would be riding away from you, and in the second place she would be sitting on it!”” (24). The uncle then replied that, even though he might not be able to spank the lady’s bottom, he would at least have the right to do so. Upon this, the cousin demanded an answer as to why. This is what Dinesen, fifty years after that incident, is now attempting to answer. She begins by pointing out that “one hundred years ago a gentleman’s education was an elaborate and costly matter. He was produced through specially predetermined, dignified, and complicated process” (Dinesen, DG 24), and that his respectful behaviour towards women was what he was judged by primarily. Part of this upbringing constituted a respect for a woman’s “holy secrets”:

It [is] difficult to explain today how the skirt – the long garment – had become such a significant, indeed decisive, symbol of women’s nobility and her legs the one sacrosanct taboo. Women of those days were not reticent about displaying their physical charms above the belt. But from the waist to the ground there were mysteries, holy secrets. (Dinesen, DG 25)

Seeing a woman on a bike with her legs exposed, then, would be anything but noble according to Dinesen’s uncle. This leads Dinesen to point out that trousers are often said to be unsuitable for women but, in her opinion, they are not suitable for men either. When she considers the robes that some of her male Somali and Arab friends wore, the trousers of western men seem deplorable. She then returns to the subject of women maintaining their dignity and mysterious power by taking a quote from her father Wilhelm Dinesen’s book, Boganis: Letters from the Hunt. In the quote he writes that a woman showing her entire leg in public is not attractive. The quotation ends with: “the secret of woman’s strength lies in suggestion.” (Dinesen, DG 27) She then reinforces this argument by providing us with two anecdotes “which illustrate this secret, symbolic importance of the female leg” (Dinesen, DG 25) – one is about a novel in which the plot develops from two men fighting over a woman after one asks the other if he had ever seen the woman’s ankle, upon which the other answers yes; the other is about a young attractive woman who gives an old man an unforgettable moment by showing him her legs. In what still constitutes the first daguerreotype, Dinesen now goes on to describe the three official groups by which “the men of that older generation” (DG 29) judged women: Guardian Angels, Housewives, and Bayadères (as mentioned earlier, a nicer term for prostitutes). There was, however, also a fourth – an unofficial – type of woman that was not viewed in relation to men, but as an independent being with “her own centre of gravity”: the Witch (Dinesen, DG 33). Dinesen writes about each group in detail, giving many examples, and I will cover this subject a lot more extensively in chapter three. The events of the second daguerreotype took place longer ago than those of the first. However, as Dinesen writes, “the greater remoteness in time has not lessened, but on the contrary has increased, its pertinence” (Dinesen, DG 37). Perhaps contradicting what she wrote at the beginning of the essay,

9 Dinesen now writes: “I do not say the even took place exactly as I describe it. My youthful fantasy played with it until it acquired its present form. I tell it now as a little story.” (DG 37). The story is about a friend of Dinesen’s aunt, a newlywed young woman called Margrethe who, with her husband, held an annual hunting festival on their estate. One day, when Margrethe was planning the menus for the hunting dinner with her “honoured housekeeper” Miss Sejlstrup, she was asked the following question by the housekeeper: “Would Madam please tell me, why must the servants have less choice food than the family?” Margrethe was thrown by this question and did not have an answer to it (Dinesen, DG 38). When, later, she asked her mother-in-law whether she knew the answer to this question, she answered that Miss Sejstrup must be crazy, and that Margrethe should ask her to be “spared such impertinent questions in the future!” As this did not answer her question, she asked her mother, who told her to discuss the conditions with Miss Sejstrup in order to eradicate the flaws. This did not answer the question either. When asked the same question, her husband answered: “It is because the family is sitting on the money bags and decides how the money is to be used.” Again, Margrethe felt that her question was unanswered. Next was her husband’s tutor, who tells her that Miss Sejlstrup is living a better life than King Erik Glipping did in his time; whereas Miss Sejlstrup can drink several cups of coffee a day, the king had neither coffee, nor tea, sugar, and chocolate. According to him, “Miss reaps such fruits of our civilization as the king could never have imagined!” (Dinesen, DG 40). When Margrethe tells the tutor that this does not answer her question and is about to leave, the tutor says to her: “[A]nd we must not forget, Lady Margrethe, that Erik Glipping was king by the grace of God!” (40). After hearing this, the lady left the tutor, more uncertain than ever. Dinesen now breaks from the story and says that, apart from telling a story, she is telling history (DG 43). According to her, some might think that people in those days refused to answer Miss Sejlstrup’s question so as not to lose their privileged position, but that she herself does not think this is the case; “[t]here was actually at that time […] a somewhat higher standard of one calls honesty or integrity” (Dinesen, DG 44). She then writes that, from personal experience, she knows how easy it is to give people a guilty conscience. Then, she gives examples of all the ways in which one might arouse a guilty conscience in someone else. For example, if someone asks a good poet what his conscience tells him about the struggling poet who lives next door, or how a beautiful person can feel no guilt sitting opposite a much uglier person. After suggesting we replace the concept of a “conscience” with the concept of “worldly goods”, Dinesen writes the following about the past era:

Let us imagine – and one can imagine what one will– that a past era, in reality and by their very nature, viewed things correctly and that its own worldly goods, in reality and by their very nature, could not be distributed evenly. (Dinesen, DG 46)

These values associated social standing and one’s relative position compared to those of others have, in more recent years, according to Dinesen, been joined by an even more powerful “new Godhead”: Comfort (Dineseon, DG 46). Now, Dinesen extensively quotes Aldous Huxley, who writes about the

10 arrival of comfort. According to Huxley, showing one’s social position – by for example, sitting on fancily decorated chairs or living in large palaces – was more important than physical well-being and a life of comfort. About Huxley, Dinesen writes: “Indeed, he says, physical well-being and comfort were without actual significance for past ages. It was rank – precedence; it was dignity, majesty, and pomp which were for them life’s greatest values. (Dinesen, DG 46). Now that comfort was added to prestige when it came to what people strove after in life, the two things could, according to Dinesen, be confused easily: “It is obvious that those persons who believe in and fight for an equal distribution of worldly goods must unknowingly look upon these worldly goods as identical with physical well-being” (Dinesen, DG 49). According to Dinesen, then, prestige does not necessarily equal comfort, and vice versa. She points out that rank – precedence – is always relative to that of other people: “If every human being sits on a throne, the value of a throne is diminished or disappears entirely” (49). She then writes that, for Huxley, comfort had no symbolic significance whereas prestige; a concept Dinesen does not completely agree with. Large, expensive vehicles, though they might be comfortable, “have their greatest value simply as symbols: they are tokens of success” (Dinesen, DG 50). She does agree, however, that the era of comfort has, more than any other time, “regularly denied symbols and rituals” (50). Miss Sejlstrup’s struck the point of intersection of two ages: several hundred years before the incident, people stressed the magnificent decoration of a table, whereas several generations after the incident, when people were in the time of comfort, the First World War brought about a time in which people gave up luxury of all kinds. The years following the First World War awoke in people the will to sacrifice and, according to Dinesen: “It was arrogant and elegantly cynical when the symbol of the elite becomes hunger.” (Dinesen, DG 55). Dinesen writes that this obsession with a frugal lifestyle was unnecessary:

The great war of liberation, which had inspired the fashion was – or became – “the war for civilization.” And civilization was – or had to come to mean – generally accessible physical well-being. The fashion, or the style, of renunciation came to mean very little. (Dinesen, DG 55).

If anything, the war should have brought about an era of greater comfort in order to stand for something, according to Dinesen; voluntarily subjecting oneself to hardship cannot be the right answer. With this thought, she returns to Miss Sejlstrup’s question. Miss Sejlstrup, who was caught in between the era of prestige and comfort, was uncertain about the relationship between the two: “Did she in her heart comprehend that it was well-being, or the prestige of those above her, which she desired?” (Dinesen, DG 55). She continues:

If we imagine that a right-thinking daughter in the age of comfort twenty-five years later had had the choice between being in the shoes of the mistress and of the manor or in those of Miss Sejlstrup, we must imagine that, for the sake of the physical well-being and comfort, she would have chosen Miss Sejlstrup’s. (Dinesen, DG 55)

11

Dinesen goes on to elaborate on the above statement by giving examples of how people with a higher social rank often lead less comfortable lives than those of their servants. One such example is the extremely uncomfortable clothes that were expected to be worn by respected people; corsets, for example, were “instruments of torture” (DG 56). Other restrictions laid upon women of the upper class included how she should sit, making obligatory visits and how to express herself orally. This relationship was considered by neither lady Margrethe, nor Miss Sejlstrup with regard to the troubling question. Miss Sejlstrup, as the evening wore on and the guests of the dinner had to remain courteous at the table, could retreat to her room, “lean back in her chair with a serialized story, and drink coffee from a saucer” (59) – prestige by no means guarantees a more comfortable life. Dinesen then goes on to discuss, using an example of her travelling nephew, how the idea of comfort has changed in more recent years (bearing in mind that the original essay was written in 1951). At the end of the essay, Dinesen describes a hypothetical meeting between Lady Margrethe and Miss Sejlstrup in heaven years after both have died. During their conversation, Miss Sejlstrup mentions that her uncle, a German traveller, had “R.V.G.G.” tattooed onto his arm, which stood for “traveller by the grace of God” (Dinesen, DG 62). This reminds Lady Margrethe of Sejlstrup’s question years back, upon which she tells her old housekeeper that she was probably wrong for believing that she once was the mistress of the estate by the grace of God (62). Miss Sejstrup replies that Lady Margrethe should not be so sure, as she herself, after thinking about it for a long time, believes that she was the housekeeper of the estate by the grace of God. After thinking about this, Margrethe says that her husband’s tutor was the cleverest of them all. Even though Dinesen does not state whether or not she agrees with this view, this section of the essay reinforces the idea that things in life such as rank and social standing are given to us and should be respected, and accepted. In the last paragraph of the essay, Dinesen writes that she has started putting her faith in the art of tattooing, which she sees as ritual art and a cult. Its most “important clientele comprised seamen and kings, people who still to this very day must have some sense of ritual” (Dinesen, DG 62).

2.1.3 “Oration at a Bonfire, Fourteen Years Late”

The original publication of this essay was as “En Baaltale med 14 Aars Forsinkelse”, in Det danske Magasin in 1953. It is the only essay Dinesen wrote on the subject of feminism and is seen as an important piece of writing when it comes to deciphering her view on the subject. At the start of the essay, Dinesen warns her readers by writing: “[I]n speaking about feminism I must begin by saying it is a matter which I do not understand, and which I have never concerned myself with of my own volition (Dinesen, DG 65). She writes that this essay is a response to an invitation she received fourteen years earlier, when a leading feminist, Estrid Hein, asked her to give the bonfire oration at the final meeting of a feminist congress. Dinesen gratefully declined, saying that she was not a feminist. When asked by

12 Hein if she was against feminism, Dinesen answered that she was not, but that she had never given the subject much thought (DG 65). It is Hein’s advice that has motivated Dinesen to now, fourteen years later, present her reflections on the subject to the public for the first time, even though they may now seem more ordinary than they might have in 1939. Dinesen begins these reflections by asking herself the most fundamental of questions regarding the subject: “Why are there two sexes?” (DG 66). She says that even though she is not qualified to answer this question, the fact that she does not understand the subject might actually be of some value. The first possibility for an answer to the question that Dinesen provides is that there are two sexes because this prevents a species from being too one-sided: two individuals produces a third, and in the course of a few generations thousands of variations have been formed. This explanation, however, does not seem satisfactory. The second explanation comes from the fact that “gradually, as the various species develop, as we put it, the difficulty of preserving and continuing the mere species grows to an extraordinary degree” (Dinesen, DG 67). Because we are so complex and so developed, “it could be necessary that one half of the race should devote itself to preservation and procreation while the other half took on the task of development and progress” (68). She then goes on to write that Kaiser Wilhelm identified woman’s functions in life by three K’s: Kirche, Kinder, Küche (Church, Children, Kitchen). She points out that this was not meant seriously by Wilhelm. Had the church been the domain of woman, for example, there would have been female priests, bishops, and popes. Had children been the domain of women, the educational system of schools would look very different. And, had the kitchen been the domain of women, for “it is the male taste which dominates both the family table and the restaurant” (Dinesen, DG 69). The higher development of our species has not defined assigned definite roles to each sex as a law of nature, according to Dinesen. Instead of clearly assigned roles, the key lies in interaction; in the unlimited possibilities which arise from the fellowship and interplay of two different individuals: “[N]o reciprocity – if one except the reciprocity between God and man – has had such decisive significance as the reciprocity between man and woman” (DG 69-70). And according to Dinesen, inspiration is the greatest human blessing, and therefore, she writes:

I think that the mutual inspiration of man and woman has been the most powerful force in the history of the race, and above all has created what is characteristic of our aristocracy: courageous exploits, poetry, the arts and the refinement of taste. (Dinesen, DG 70)

In order for a society to be rich and animated, then, there must be mutual inspiration – men must inspire women and vice versa. As for her personal taste regarding men and how they inspire her, Dinesen agrees with Mussolini: “Non amo i sedentari!” – ‘I don’t like people who sit down’ “ (DG 71), which suggests that Dinesen is drawn to active, goal-orientated men. After describing attempts of other authors and poets to pinpoint the difference between men and women, Dinesen writes that a definite conclusion is impossible. From her personal point of view,

13 however, the inspirational difference between the sexes is the following: “A man’s centre of gravity, the substance of his being, consists in what he has executed and performed in life; the woman’s in what she is” (Dinesen, DG 73). Columbus discovered America but Elizabeth I was simply Queen without having executed any significant deed; father built a bridge, mother was lovely. According to Dinesen, whereas man creates something outside himself and abandons it for the next challenge when he is done, the woman’s function is to expand her own being. A man, if he has neither created nor accomplished anything is held in low esteem, whereas women can be remembered by possessing a sort of magnetism that made them popular. Because males are so goal-orientated, one cannot teach a boy needlework; “an activity which does not lead to any facit seems strange to him” (Dinesen, DG 77). Art is an exception to this characteristic, however – art is an extension of the artist’s own being and his work does not really lie beyond him but is himself (77). Women, on the other hand, do not create art, but are able to become art – they can be actresses, singers, or dancers (an idea I will return to in chapter 6). Dinesen now writes that, going by what she has written so far in the essay, one might deduce that she is against feminism. This is not the case, however; she knows in what debt she stands “to the older women of the women’s movement now in their graves” (Dinesen, DG 79). It is because of these women that Dinesen has been allowed to study, travel and get her work published. Even though she appreciates what the feminists of former generations have achieved, she writes:

But today is over a hundred years since the concept of feminism first arose and since the grand old women struck the first blow for us. I wonder whether they would not themselves look upon it as a triumph, as a demonstration of the victory they have won, that we today can lay down the weapons they took up? (Dinesen, DG 80)

It seems that, by this, Dinesen is suggesting that there may no longer be a need for the activist type of feminism that paved the way for the emancipated, free woman of today. According to her, feminists of the past were sly for infiltrating a system run by men, almost like the Archaeans did in Troy with their wooden horse (Dinesen, DG 80). They wore costumes that “intellectually or psychologically represented male” (80) and, in doing so, proved that they too were capable of becoming doctors and lawyers. However,

[t]oday, woman has sprung out from the wooden horse and walks within the walls of the citadels. And she has certainly such a firm footing in the old strongholds that she can confidently open her visor and show the world that she is a woman and no disguised rogue. (Dinesen, DG 80)

Dinesen therefore no longer sees the need for women to imitate men; nowadays, a woman can be successful in what she wants to achieve without losing her femininity. Another thing Dinesen adds is that the roles played by women today and in the past need not be seen as second compared to mainly occupied by men: “while the clergyman preached, christened, married and buries, the clergyman’s wife was present in the parish, and many times there was a brighter Christian light shining from the kitchen

14 of the manse than form the pulpit.” In their own way, women can have just as much – if not more – impact on society as men. Indeed, even though most official judges may be men, “most disputes and matters of dissent in homes and within the families have, in the course of time, been laid before woman judges and have been settled by them” (Dinesen, DG 84). By this Dinesen means, of course, the women of a household. It is then perhaps not a coincidence that clergymen and judges, with their decorative robes and wigs, wear garments resembling the feminine. Women need not be pitied, therefore, for they have qualities that men do not. What both sexes should understand, and appreciate, is that men and women are different, and that these differences have their positive and negative sides. To this idea, Dinesen adds:

And out of deep personal conviction I wish to add that precisely our small society – in which human beings have achieved so much in what they are able to do and in the concrete results they can show – needs people who are. Indeed, our time can be said to need a revision or its ambition from doing to being. (Dinesen, DG 85)

Bearing in mind what wrote earlier about men doing and women being, the above suggests that, for Dinesen, society could benefit from adopting a more feminine nature. What she now does is, albeit indirectly, compare women to trees, faithful to its own being and expressing energy through growth, and men to motors, which can be used for different things, losing energy through comparably arbitrary means. She continues with the following, which, in my opinion, is important enough to be quoted at length:

At times it can seem that our day, proud of its mighty achievements, would claim the superiority of the motor over the oak tree, the machine over growth. But it is also conceivable that in such an evaluation we have been misled by an interpretation of the theory of the survival of the fittest. It is clear that the motor can destroy the oak tree—while the oak tree cannot be thought capable of destroying the motor—but what follows? That which itself has no independent being—or is without any loyalty to such a being—is unable to create. Now I have not meant that women are trees and men are motors, but I wish to insinuate into the minds of the women of our time as well as those of the men, that they should meditate not only upon what they may accomplish but most profoundly upon what they are. (Dinesen, DG 86)

Even though Dinesen has, at times, distanced herself from feminists and feminism, it is the feminine that she stresses and promotes in the above quotation. It is man who is, physically, able to destroy woman, but it is woman who gave birth to man in the first place. One should not, therefore, forget or underestimate her worth. There should be a shift in society from workmen who produce things to men who are artisans; from people who do not sail but are sailors; from people who can not only write a piece of literature but who are poets (Dinesen, DG 87).

15 2.2 Seven Gothic Tales

Even though Dinesen had already published tales in Danish journals under the pen name Osceola, Seven Gothic Tales is widely considered her first real publication as an author. When she was forced to leave Africa in 1931 after seventeen years of living there, Dinesen had already completed two of the seven tales: “The Monkey” and “The Roads Round Pisa”. She wrote the other five tales in Denmark and published the collection in 1934 to critical acclaim. As mentioned earlier, Dinesen wrote Seven Gothic Tales in English. According to Brantly, this had three reasons (13). Firstly, the English-language book market was much larger than the Danish, so it was economically wiser to try to penetrate that market. Secondly, after seventeen years in Kenya, Dinesen felt (most) comfortable expressing herself in English. Finally, “in her view, the English- Speaking countries possessed a stronger tradition of fantastic literature than Denmark” (Brantly 13). And indeed, the decision to publish the book in English seemed to have been wise, as the book did extremely well when it was first published in the United States and Britain. At the time, one American reviewer noted: “Seven Gothic Tales has burst upon us from a gray literary sky” (Ballou 3). The timing for Dinesen’s fantastic tales seemed perfect, as the United States were still suffering from the Great depression. Therefore, “exotic locations and strange happenings were welcome because they could remove the reader from the harsh realities of the everyday” (Brantly 14) – exactly what Dinesen’s book offers. Brantly also notes that the hugely successful film King Kong was released in theatres in the same year; any form of escapism was welcome (14). Dinesen was not initially met with so much enthusiasm when she published the book as Syv fantastiske Fortællinger (Seven Fantastic Tales) in Denmark, after she had recast it into Danish. The main reasons for this is because, at the time, social realism dominated literature in Denmark, and “Dinesen’s imaginative tales set in the previous century were quite different from what most Danes were reading” (Brantly 14). According to the literary critic Svend Borberg, “[i]t was naturally very cheeky, not to say brash, of Isak Dinesen—alias Baroness Karen Blixen—to conquer the world first with her book Seven Gothic Tales and then come to Denmark with it. As a Danish author she should have felt obligated to ask here at home first if she was worth anything” (3). The relationship between Dinesen and the Danes would remain somewhat uneasy throughout her career. This did not stop Seven Gothic Tales from being voted the third most important Danish work of the 20th century by readers of Politiken, an important Danish newspaper, in 1999 (Brantly 14). When asked why she chose to name her tales “Gothic”, Dinesen answered that it was because “in England it places the stories in time and implies something that both has an elevated tone and can erupt into jests and mockery, into devilry and mystery” (Vidi 1). She also points out that she “didn’t mean the real Gothic, but the imitation of the Gothic, the Romantic age of Byron, the age that man – what was his name? – Who built Strawberry Hill, the age of the gothic revival” (Cate 153). The gothic revival in literature began in the 1880s when writers began to fictionalise contemporary fears and problems related

16 to social structures, ethical degeneration, race, and gender. Notable examples include Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and George du Maurier's Trilby (1894). Even though Dinesen’s book was published considerably later than these examples, the stories are set in the 1800’s and fit nicely into this category of literature, which “liberate the imagination from the fetters which too familiar an environment imposes upon it” (Johannesson 28), and often feature Byronic rebels with secret pasts who “reject the moral claims of society” (Brantly 15). About the tales, Susan Hardy Aiken notes that the “paradoxical conjunctions of horror with pleasure, monstrosity with laughter–and the sexual and textual implications thereof–are inherent in [Dinesen’s] designation of her inaugural collection as “Gothic” ” (67). Whereas the English version of the book explicitly associates itself with the gothic, the Danish version of the book is entitled Syv Fantastiske Fortællinger (Seven Fantastic Tales). This, according to Brantly, is “the result of a canny assessment of her potential audiences and the literary traditions with which they are familiar” (14). Whereas the British were familiar with gothic literature, Danish readers were more acquainted with German romantic literature, which is often associated with the “fantastic”, such as E.T.A Hoffmann’s Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (Fantasy pieces in the manner of Callot) from 1815. In a 1934 interview, Dinesen called Seven Gothic Tales a nonsense book for the following reason: “I don’t know another word for books in which all sorts of fantastic things happen. You probably know Hoffmann’s Tales? It is something of the same sort, but not really the same” (Vidi 1). Here, she drew a direct comparison between her book and Hoffman’s fantasy pieces, and indeed, her “nonsense” bears similarities with German romantic literature, whose authors integrated irony and literary masks into their work. As Brantly writes: Adopting a literary mask enables the author to relinquish narrative authority and forces the reader to assess the bias of the narrative. The narrative says one thing but may imply another, and the reader must be attentive to catch the nuances. This effect, which engages the participation of the reader in deciphering the text, is known as romantic irony. (16)

This, as those familiar with the work of Dinesen will undoubtedly know, is a key element of her literature – nuanced messages and literary masks are abundant in Seven Gothic Tales. Therefore, Karen Blixen, writing under her pseudonym Isak Dinesen, “nestles tales within tales within tales. The reader is consistently thwarted in her or his attempt to locate an ultimate voice of authority” (Brantly 17). Ambiguity and uncertainty permeate Dinesen and her work, and this thesis aims to take some of that away.

17 Chapter 3 – Types of Women

As mentioned in the prior chapter, Dinesen writes in her essay “Daguerreotypes” that “men of [the] older generation viewed women from three points of view or as three groups–that is to say, viewed or judged them officially in such a manner” (Dinesen, DG 29). Women were, for these men, guardian angels, housewives, or bayadères (which is a French word for dancer but is, in this context, as mentioned before, a nicer term for prostitute). Dinesen writes that the “ideal woman of real life was a mixture of guardian angel and housewife. In art the most admired and most popular ideal was a mixture of angel and bayadère” (29). But there was a woman “who, long before the words “emancipation of women” came into use, existed independently of a man and had her own center of gravity. She was the witch” (Dinesen, DG 33). There were, therefore, four types of women: three official types that had their “calling, justification, and importance in relationship to man” (32), and one unofficial type who lived outside the confinements imposed by man. In this chapter, I will show that before Dinesen wrote “Daguerreotypes”, she had already expressed the ideas surrounding, and characteristics of, these four types of women in Seven Gothic Tales, namely through the character of Nathalie in “The Old Chevalier”. In “The Old Chevalier”, the diegetic narrator recalls the time that Baron von Brackel, an old friend of his father, told him the story about his encounter with a mysterious beauty named Nathalie. It is therefore a fictional narrator recounting the words of another fictional character. Therefore, the reliability of what is about to be said is questionable from the beginning (something I shall return to later on in this section). Von Brackel meets Nathalie in Paris in the winter of 1874, and this is a consequence of his former lover attempting to poison him. After this murder attempt on a cold, rainy night, von Brackel sits on a public bench as suddenly a young woman approaches him. “Sick to death with horror and humiliation” (Dinesen, SGT 90), von Brackel initially pays the girl little attention. He then changes his mind: “I had to get away from my own thoughts, and any human being was welcome to assist me. But there was something extraordinarily graceful and expressive about the girl, which may have attracted me to her” (90). In this time of despair, von Brackel continues, “there was, I remember, a certain comfort in having her near me, for I did not want to be alone” (91). After a while of conversing, von Brackel invites Nathalie to his home where, where he sees her “as if she were a gift to me, and her presence a kind and friendly act of fate at this moment when I could not be alone” (Dinesen, SGT 92). When, later on, Nathalie begins to sing, the Baron’s feelings of appreciation are reaffirmed: “Her song increased the feeling I had, that something special and more than natural had been sent to me” (92). It is clear to see that, even though he does not say so explicitly, in these moments, Nathalie represents von Brackel’s guardian angel. Dinesen describes the guardian angel the following way in “Daguerreotypes”:

18 “The guardian angel – unadulterated – shed a heavenly light at a man’s side and protected him against the power of darkness. […]. [She] is surrounded by a mystical aura, and where she is envisaged in long white garments, hovering, it would certainly be profane or actually precluded to direct attention to her legs” (29)

She is, therefore, seen as a protector of man who it is inappropriate to view in a sexual way. And indeed, until now, von Brackel has not referred to Nathalie in a way that would directly connote a sexual relation with her. Also, like Dinesen’s guardian angel, Nathalie clearly has a “mystical aura”. This is most clearly shown in several examples, one being when von Brackel says the following: “If I had been normally balanced I suppose I should have tried to get from her some explanation of the sort of mystery that she seemed to be, but now I do not think that this occurred to me at all.” (Dinesen, SGT 91). Another example is the following: “She seemed to me to have come as a little wild spirit from the great town outside – Paris – which may at any moment bestow unexpected favors on one, and which had in the right moment sent her to me.” (Dinesen, SGT 92). A “wild spirit” that “bestows unexpected favors” on one does suggest a mystical aura. However, that these favors will turn out to be sexual in nature is perhaps not surprising, considering the context of von Brackel inviting an unknown “young and lovely” (92) girl to his house one evening. And indeed, in the moments that follow, Nathalie begins to resemble what Dinesen describes in “Daguerreotypes” as the bayadère. Unlike the guardian angel, the bayadère is very much aware of her legs; they are one of her biggest assets – they are sexual capital that she uses to her advantage: “One might say that […] the true gentleman’s loyalty vis-à-vis the dignity of woman found expression in the sums he was willing to pay to see the bayadère’s legs” (Dinesen, DG 31). Because, in times of very conservative codes regarding sexuality, the bayadère was seen as a taboo-breaker, the “guardian angel and the housewife could not possibly sanction the existence of the bayadère. Nevertheless there must have been a certain satisfaction for them to have, in the bayadère, on paper and in definite figures, so to speak, a kind of proof of what their own womanly stake was worth” (Dinesen, DG 32). She was an “outcast of society” (Dinesen, DG 32) and “had her calling, her justification, and her importance [defined] in relationship to man” (Pringle 640). Even though, when he takes her home, von Brackel is (still) unaware of the fact that Nathalie is a prostitute, her unrestrained behavior regarding intimacy with a stranger would have been extremely frowned upon: “[B]ut as I undid her tight bodice and my hands touched her cool shoulders and bosom, her face broke into a gentle and wide smile, and she lifted up her hand and touched her fingers” (Dinesen, SGT 93). She is, therefore, first presented as a prostitute – or at least a person very open about her sexuality – figuratively until it is revealed, at the end of the story when she asks von Brackel for twenty francs, that she is literally a prostitute. The third category of woman is the housewife, and “whether she is the mistress of a castle or of a manse or is a farmer’s wife–is naturally more tangible [than the guardian angel]” (Dinesen, DG 30). Further, Dinesen writes: “Though the children and servants in the household would risk a strong reprimand if they made fun of the master of the house, that did not mean they were lost souls. But scoff

19 at the mother or mistress of the household was a sacrilege” (Dinesen, DG 30). She was therefore a respected member of the family, but “did not have legs either” (30) and was therefore not a sexual being. It is suggested that Nathalie, albeit briefly, also represents this category of woman at certain points in the tale. One such moment is when von Brackel recounts his feelings during his conversation with Nathalie at his supper table: “I believe that this feeling of safety and perfect freedom must be what happily married people mean when they talk about the two being one” (Dinesen, SGT 99). Here, he directly compares himself and Nathalie to a married couple, symbolically making her his (house-) wife. Here, the tone has shifted from being sexual to being emotional; the focus has gone from Nathalie’s legs to her liberating offerings: safety and freedom. The following example also bears a marital connotation: “I remember the silence when her song was finished, and that I pushed the table away, and how I came slowly down on one knee before her” (Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales 98). The fact that von Brackel “came slowly down on one knee before her” paints a rather vivid picture of a marriage proposal; the desire to have Nathalie as his wife. Having now embodied each of the official three groups of women, Nathalie now goes on to personify the fourth, unofficial, group: the witch. In “Daguerreotypes”, Dinesen writes the following about the witch:

The witch has played a greater or lesser role in various eras but she has never entirely disappeared. One may suppose that for most men the explanation is, that a woman who can exist without God, or that a woman who does not want to be possessed by a man necessarily must be possessed by the devil. The witch had absolutely no scruples about showing her legs; she sat quite unconstrained astride her broomstick and took off […]. [D]espite all the sinister atmosphere and abandon which surrounded her–the witch cannot be said to have renounced or betrayed the dignity of woman.

The witch was therefore, a sexually liberated, emancipated woman who could move outside the confines of a society dominated by men. At the end of von Brackel’s story, Nathalie asks him for twenty francs and, in doing so, reveals that she is a prostitute. The consequence of this is that von Brackel sees her in a new light:

I did not speak. I sat there looking at her. Her clear and light eyes met mine. […] This was the first moment, I think, since I had met her, in which I saw her as a human being, within an existence of her own, and not as a gift to me. (Dinesen, SGT 102)

Nathalie has, in rendering the Baron speechless with her question, achieved a status outside of the three groups of women dependent on man (the housewife, the guardian angel and the bayadère). She now, like the witch, exists “independently of a man and [has] her own center of gravity” (Dinesen, DG 33). Von Brackel’s reaction upon learning that Nathalie is a prostitute comes very close to what Dinesen writes in “Daguerreotypes” about one of the characteristics of a witch:

[I]f a woman will have her way with a man she must look him square in the eye and say something of which it is impossible for him to make any sense whatsoever and to which he is at a loss to reply. He is defeated at once (Dinesen, DG 35)

20

Upon hearing “and you will give me twenty francs, will you not?” (Dinesen, SGT 102), then, von Brackel is “defeated at once”. Seeing the evening as a game “the two had played” (Dinesen, SGT 102), von Brackel continues:

Her own demand was well within the spirit of the night. For the palace which he builds, for four hundred white and four hundred black slaves all loaded with jewels, the djinn asks for an old copper lamp; and the forest-witch who moves three towns and creates for the woodcutter’s son an army of horse-soldiers demands for herself the heart of a hare. The girl asked me for her pay in the voice and manner of the djinn and the forest-witch, and if I were to give her twenty francs she might still be safe within the magic circle of her free and graceful and defiant spirit.

Here, a more explicit comparison to a witch is made. In the Koran and Muslim tradition, a djinn is a spirit often capable of assuming human or animal form and exercising supernatural influence over people, and a forest witch is a supernatural being found more often in western folklore and literature. In the above description, these two beings – which people often assume would exercise their power malignantly – help people generously without expecting much in return. It is thus von Brackel who has, in the game played with Nathalie, taken more than he had to give; he used Nathalie for his own selfish consolation and sexual gratification, and the price of twenty francs is nothing in comparison. As already mentioned, Dinesen wrote in “Daguerreotypes” that “the ideal woman of real life was a mixture of guardian angel and housewife. In art the most admired and most popular ideal was a mixture of angel and bayadère” (29). Therefore one woman could, and often did, embody more than one type of woman. This can also be seen in the more ambiguous descriptions of Nathalie. For example, consider von Brackel’s following statement, made when he describes undressing Nathalie: “I thought it after all only reasonable, only to be expected, that the great friendly power of the universe should manifest itself again, and send me, out of the night, as a help and consolation, this naked and drunk young girl, a miracle of gracefulness.” (Dinesen, SGT 98). Her, this “naked and drunk young girl” serves as both a consoler in a time of need and a bringer of sexual favours; a guardian angel and a bayadère – art’s most popular mixture of woman. At different times, Nathalie seems to express rather undeniably the four groups of women described by Dinesen in her essay “Dageurreotypes”, which was published seventeen years after Seven Gothic Tales. This suggests that Dinesen was not only aware of these four types of women years before she officially described them in her essay, but that she also carefully incorporated these into her debut book. Through Nathalie, each of the four types of women is expressed at different times throughout the tale, sometimes more than one at once. In the end, it is the witch that shines through and defeats man with her independence. Perhaps Nathalie is, then, a literary tool for showing each of the types of woman in relation to man – a tool that ultimately shows us, her readers, the ideal type: the witch. About the role of the witch in Dinesen’s literature, Stambaugh writes:

21 If her attitude toward feminism is complex, in the figure of the witch Dinesen found a means of expressing it […]. It is not surprising that the witch is a central figure in her fiction. Not only is the witch quintessential woman, but she reflects as well the superior powers associated with women through the ancient moon goddesses and their descendants, the medieval practitioners of the Craft of the Wise […]. [S]he not only expresses the power of womanhood in a particularly feminine form but also reflects the difficulties the emancipated woman faces in the twentieth century. (Stambaugh, Witch as Quintessential Woman 98)

As I hope to have shown, Nathalie perfectly embodies these “difficulties emancipated woman faces in the twenthieth century (even though the Seven Gothic Tales were set in the 19th century, they were written for a 20th century audience). Women, if they are not emancipated like the witch, run the risk of being used by men for their own means. Nathalie may have not been a witch per se, but was seen by man as such, and this recognition is enough to earn the respect and independence that she did not receive as the other types of women. It is worth considering that, both in “Daguerreotypes” and “The Old Chevalier”, Dinesen makes the credibility, and reliability, of what is written, questionable; both sources, in different ways, suggest that what is being read should be done so with a hint of suspicion. In “The Old Chevalier”, the fact that the story of Nathalie is told in the form of a fictional character’s recollection of another fictional character’s account, makes what is being told seem rather unreliable. The language used strengthens this. For example, von Brackel is quoted by the narrator as saying the following: “ I think that I must have been sitting there for some time, and that she must have stood and watched me before she could summon up her courage to approach.” (Dinesen, SGT 90). This sentence is only one example of many that suggests the unreliability of the story told: von Brackel “thinks” that he “must” have been sitting there for some time, and she “must” have stood there and watched him – the story sounds like an accumulation of assumptions and uncertainties. The fact that we are reading a (fictional) young man’s recount of a (fictional) old man’s account, and that facts and details can easily become lost, distorted, or added this way, is amplified by this. Similarly, after describing the four types of women in “Daguerreotypes”, Dinesen writes the following: “I have already said that the views which I am presenting here are not my own, and that I cannot be held responsible for them. I myself – many years ago, in Africa – had my reservations about Lady Colville’s creed (Dinesen, DG 36). Lady Colville is the person who, according to Dinesen, told her about the types of women and described the features of witches to her. By recounting what someone else had told her and saying that these thoughts are not her own, Dinesen distances herself from what she has just written and avoids responsibility for it. The fact that Dinesen lays out the types of women subtly in Seven Gothic Tales, and explicitly in Daguerreotypes, suggests that she had given the subject a substantial amount of thought and wanted her readers to know about it. Why, in both texts, she distances herself from the ideas expressed is difficult to determine but an interesting aspect to keep in mind. Perhaps she did not agree with the ideas but found them interesting to write about, or she agreed with

22 them but preferred not to be held accountable for them4. However, perhaps it is exactly this sort of speculation that she aimed to achieve. As Brantly points out, “Dinesen grew irritated on occasion when asked about the meaning of her tales, and, especially, whenever critics tried to find meaning outside the text in the author’s opinions or life. Her texts employ many elaborate devices to undermine narrative authority: embedding tales within tales, employing unreliable narrators, using pseudonyms, and so forth” (6). These diversionary tactics make the texts more interesting but the author more difficult to figure out. Having now called attention to this feature of Dinesen’s work, the upcoming sections will not – unless otherwise stated– deal with her distraction tactics, allowing the thesis to stay on topic and to avoid confusion5. Now that the recurrence of the types of women in Dinesen’s literature has been examined, the upcoming section will deal more specifically with the relationship between women and men. This will focus on the author’s ideas regarding the coexistence of both sexes and the dependency on one another, and the ways in which both genders inherently differ.

4 This is ironic, considering that one of Dinesen’s reasons for choosing the motto Je responderay was the following: “I will answer for what I say or do; I will answer to the impression I make. I will be responsible” (Dinesen, DG 9). 5 I will, however, consider this point in the conclusion

23 Chapter 4 – The Relationship Between Man and Woman

In the beginning of “Oration at a Bonfire, Fourteen Years Late”, Dinesen asks herself why there are to sexes (66). Even though her answers are mere contemplations, one thing is clear: without both male and female human beings, our world would look very different. It is this coexistence of man and woman that has not only defined our world and, consequently, literature; themes of love, deceit, sex, friendship, power, and existence in general can all be traced back to this dualism in one way or another. Dinesen’s literature is, of course, full of the differences, similarities, struggles and relationships between men and women – her essays as well as her (short) stories. It is interesting to see, then, which of these themes and ideas we see recurring in her work, which is what this chapter will shed light on. The first recurring idea carries on from what Dinesen wrote about the four types of women mentioned in the prior section. Apart from the witch, Dinesen writes that the other three types of women were only acknowledged relative to man:

The guardian angel, the housewife, and the bayadère – each had her calling, her justification, and her importance in relationship to man. They saved and guided him, or they took care of his well-being and reputation, or they entraptured and transported him. Eve was created from Adam’s rib; it was for man’s sake that woman existed and Søren Kierkegaard defined a woman’s being as “existence for something else”. (Dinesen, Daguerreotypes 32-33)

The above quotation describes what Dinesen believes to have been a common view of women for her uncle’s generation and the generations before him. As “witches” were rare exceptions in society, the above mentioned categories of women would have constituted the majority of women (and therefore, most women were only acknowledged in their relation to man). As already mentioned, the Baron in “The Old Chevalier” sees Nathalie as a gift to him until she reveals herself to fall into the category of a witch, upon which he finally sees her “as a human being, within an existence of her own” (Dinesen, SGT 102). This is not the only time that (the idea of) woman’s dependence on man is described in Seven Gothic Tales. In “The Deluge At Norderney”, when the old Miss Nat-og-Dag, “a maiden lady of great wealth”, tells the Cardinal the story of Countess Calypso von Platen and her relationship to her father, woman’s dependence on man is once again stated. Calypso grew up in a castle with her father, who only liked males and disregarded females. Even though Calypso was “the loveliest thing in the place” (Dinesen, SGT 45), her father and his friends took no notice of her:

[H]ere she knew that she did not exist, for nobody ever looked at her. Where, My Lord, is music bred—upon the instrument or within the ear that listens? The loveliness of woman is created in the eye of man. You talk, Timon, of Lucifer offending God by looking at him to see what he was like. That shows that you worship a male deity. A goddess would ask her worshiper first of all: ‘How am I looking?” (Dinesen, SGT 45)

24 The above quotation is taken from Nat-og-Dag’s story, and so represents the views of a woman “during the last quarter of the last century” (Dinesen, SGT 1). As Dinesen wrote the tale in the early 20th century, Nat-og-Dag’s views would have been expressed in the late 19th century; around the same time that the “older generation” that Dinesen speaks of in Daguerreotypes would have seen women in three male- dependent categories. In the tale, Nat-og-Dag –a woman– is therefore well aware of a woman’s position in society: a woman’s beauty is created “in the eye of man”, and without man’s opinion she is nothing. Agnese in “The Roads Round Pisa”, on the other hand, represents a perhaps more modern stance regarding this idea. When, in “The Roads Round Pisa”, Count Augustus von Schimmelmann has a conversation with what he believes to be a young boy at an inn whilst on his way to Pisa, the boy turns out to be, in fact, a woman: Agnese (as we find out later on in the story). This revelation causes the following reaction in the Count:

Augustus thought that he had hardly ever talked to a young woman whose chief interest in the conversation had not been the impression that she herself was making on him, and he reflected that this must be what generally made converse with women awkward and dull to him. The way in which this young woman seemed to take a friendly and confident interest in him, without apparently giving any thought to what he thought of her, seemed to him new and sweet, as if he suddenly realized that he had all his life been looking for such an attitude in a woman. He wished that he could now himself keep away from the conventional accent of male and female conversation. (Dinesen, SGT 183-184)

The above quotation not only reflects the idea of woman’s actions being dependent on the expectations of men, but also the potentially positive effects that can come from the abolishment of such codes and expectations; Agnese’s lack of self-consciousness deeply impresses Augustus. The benefits of a more evenly distributed gender roles is hereby presented. In “Oration at a Bonfire, Fourteen Years Late”, Dinesen writes about the importance of “mutual inspiration” between men and women (70). To illustrate this, she recounts the time she went to a museum on the island of Fanø and attempted to imagine “how life must have been lived in a society where, so to speak, all the men went to sea and sailed around the earth while very few – if any – of the women left Fanø during their lifetimes”:

[F]or the widely travelled men there was perhaps a peculiar inspiration to be obtained form the women–dressed in orthodox Fanø costumes, with kerchiefed heads – to whom they returned after theirs journeys and who lent half an ear to their reports of shipwrecks, cannibals, and sea monsters but were eager to tell them that the clergyman’s cow had thrown to motley calves. And I understand that life on Fanø was harmonious and happy at the time when society was basically dependent upon seafaring. Something of the same must have held true for all the maritime nations, and I am of the opinion that life within them was generally rich and flourishing–yes, even inspired in its own way, as it was in Venice, Holland, and England in those times when the rank of a nation, and rank among nations, was determined by its proficiency in sailing. (DG 71)

25 For Dinesen, this sort of society, in which men sail and only sporadically see their families, is seen as a very positive, and productive, thing. Once the men return from their voyages, both men and women have much to tell one another. Both sexes have roles that are different but dependent on the other: the men provide for the family while the women care for the family. The men and woman understand and inspire each other in their roles, and this brings about harmony and a prosperous society. Nowadays, of course, this may sound like an out-dated promotion of a typically patriarchal family image; each gender has its role, and together the status quo is maintained. A very similar idea is expressed in “The Supper At Elsinore”, when the sisters Eliza and Fanny De Coninck hold a dinner party for a group of friends consisting mainly of men:

If these sisters could not live without men, it was because they had the firm conviction, which, as an instinct, runs in the blood of seafaring families, that the final word as to what you are really worth, lies with the other sex […]. Old white skippers, who have been round the Horn and out in a hundred hurricanes, know the law. They may be highly respected on the deck or in the mess, and honored by their staunch gray contemporaries, but it is, finally, the girls who have the say as to whether they are worth keeping alive or not. The old sailor’s women are aware of this fact, and will take a good deal of trouble to impress even the young boys toward a favorable judgment. This doctrine, and this quick estimating eye is developed in sailor’s families because there the two sexes have the chance to see each other at a distance. A sailor, or a sailor’s daughter, judges a person of the other sex as quickly and surely as a hunter judges a horse; a farmer, a head of cattle; and a soldier, a rifle. In the families of clergymen and scribes, where the men sit in their houses all their days, people may judge each other extremely well individually, but no man knows what a woman is, and no woman what a man is; they cannot see the wood for trees. (SGT 236- 237)

Like the families on the Fanø island that Dinesen had imagined, the above passage shows the mutual dependence and understanding between the sexes in seafarer families. Because the two sexes “have the chance to see each other at a distance”, they are able to form a better understanding of one another. This suggests that they are able to be themselves without the other’s influence for a while, enabling them to form opinions of the other until they cross paths. Unlike in Nat-og-Dag’s description, this dependence is reciprocal; men need women just as much as women need them. Seven Gothic Tales also addresses the difference in nature between men and women that Dinesen describes in “Oration at a Bonfire, Fourteen Years Late”. As mentioned in the earlier section, Dinesen writes that “a man’s center of gravity, the substance of his being, consists in what he has executed and performed in his life; woman’s, in what she is.” (Dinesen, DG 73). This is paired with the idea of men doing and destroying (like a motor) and women being and giving life (like a tree). According to Dinesen, this was “an idea that I have meditated on for some time and which has much occupied me, though I have not been able to explain it clearly to others” (DG 85). It is possible, therefore, that Dinesen had already attempted to explain this to her readers nineteen years earlier, again in the scene of “The Roads Around Pisa” in which Augustus von Schimmelmann finds out that he has been talking to a

26 young woman and not a boy. After Augustus says that landed property and women are a part of a man’s spiritual and physical law of gravitation, the girl acts in the following way:

“You do not,” he said, “really think that I am a man? I am not, and under your favor, I am happy not to be. I know, of course, that great work has been achieved by men, but still I think that the world would be a more tranquil place if men did not come in to break up, very often, the things that we cherish.” (Dinesen, SGT 183)

The above reaction echoes the ideas expressed by Dinesen in her Oration essay: Agnese acknowledges man’s achievements (they are the sex that does); men are capable of, and often do, destroy what is dear to woman (women give life whereas men destroy); and the world would be more “tranquil” were the former not the case. After appreciating Agnese’s independence and carefree attitude regarding the conversation with a man, Augustus gives a reply to what she has just said. He says that he thinks that it is a shame that man and woman have not learned to better please each other, and after he mentions a former love who he failed to please, says: “For myself, I think that women, for some reason, will not let us know. They do not want an understanding. They want to mobilize for war. But I wish that once, in all the time of men and women, two ambassadors could meet in a friendly mind and come to understand each other.” (Dinesen, SGT 184). This, again, echoes the “mutual inspiration” and reciprocity of men and women mentioned earlier. Agnese then goes on to say that God, when he created Adam and Eve, appointed Adam the role of the guest, and Eve the role of the hostess (Dinesen, SGT 185). She continues: “Therefore man takes love lightly, for the honor and dignity of his house is not involved therein. And you can also, surely, be a guest to many people to whom you would never want to be a host” (185). There lies, then, according to Agnese, more responsibility and expectations on the woman than on the man. She then asks Augustus what, according to him, the guest wants. Augustus replies that, apart from the crude guest who wants to be regaled,

“a guest wants first of all to be diverted, to get out of his daily monotony or worry. Secondly the decent guest wants to shine, to expand himself and impress his own personality upon his surroundings. And thirdly, perhaps, he wants to find some justification for his existence altogether.” (Dinesen, SGT 185)

These desires of men come very close to what Dinesen writes about the nature of man in “Oration”: “The man creates something by himself but outside of himself and often, when it is finished, abandons it and pushes it out of his consciousness in order to start something else […]. A man who has accomplished nothing and created nothing is not held in much esteem” (73). In both quotations the desire, or expectation, of a man to prove himself by achieving things is stressed; only this way will he be respected. Feeling important, and thereby needed, is an essential part of being a man. After telling Agnese the three things that man, the guest, wants, Augustus asks her what the hostess wants. Upon this question Agnese simply answers that the hostess “wants to be thanked” (185). This marks the end of the

27 conversation between the two. In comparison to the man who wants to achieve, be diverted and find justification in his existence, the woman is not so concerned with such things “outside of herself” – she is happy as long as her service is not taken for granted. Two ideas regarding the relationship, and difference, between men and women expressed by Dinesen in “Oration at a Bonfire, Fourteen Years Late” had already been written about in Seven Gothic Tales. Firstly, the idea that a functioning a co-existence between the sexes lies in “mutual inspiration”. Secondly, that men are the sex more concerned with doing, whereas women with being, and that society could benefit from a shift towards a more feminine mode of existence. The upcoming section will deal more specifically with women escaping the clutches of man, namely with feminism and the emancipation of women.

28 Chapter 5 – Feminism and the “Emancipation of Woman”

Even though Dinesen claimed to not have thought much about feminism prior to her essay “Oration at a Bonfire, Fourteen Years Late” from 1953, it is rather clear that she had indeed given the subject thought – even before she declined to speak at the feminist congress in 1939. Indeed, as Sara Stambaugh writes:

If Isak Dinesen rejected conventional feminism, it was not through lack of familiarity. In fact, she was raised in a family bristling with militant feminists. After her father's suicide when she was nine, she spent most of her life until her marriage at twenty-eight in a matriarchal society dominated by her maternal grandmother, her mother and her mother's sister, Mary Bess Westenholtz. All three had strong personalities […] Dinesen's mother was also a political activist. When Danish women were granted the vote in 1916 she was elected "to Hørsholm Parish Council, and when it turned out that she was the eldest of the elected members, for a few days she had the honour of being Denmark's first woman parish councillor." Isak Dinesen, then, grew up watching the fight for women's rights, because "the grand old women [who] struck the first blow for us" included her intimate relatives.” (Stambaugh, Witch as Quintessential Woman 93)

Having been exposed to feminism from an early age, it is perhaps not surprising that the subject is also present in Seven Gothic Tales. What might be surprising, however, is how many ideas described in Oration in 1953, Dinesen’s “only essay she published about feminism” (Stambaugh, Witch as Quintessential Woman 90) are already uttered by the fictional Baron von Brackel in “The Old Chevalier”. As mentioned earlier, before the Baron begins the story of his encounter with Nathalie, he tells the tale of how his former lover attempted to poison him. This woman was, at the time, married with another man and “she took her lovers as she took her fences, to pile up more conquests than the man with whom she was in love” (Dinesen, SGT 87). According to the Baron, this woman greatly loved her husband but was in constant competition with him – especially when it came to making the other jealous by having the most lovers. After stating that he did not “know how this had begun between them” (Dinesen, SGT 87), he begins the following monologue about women in the time of his youth:

Now you will know that all this happened in the early days of what we called then the “emancipation of woman.” Many strange things took place then. I do not think that at the time the movement went very deep down in the social world, but here were the young women of the highest intelligence, and the most daring and ingenious of them, coming out of the chiaroscuro of a thousand years, blinking at the sun and wild with desire to try their wings. [...] But most women, when they feel free to experiment with life, will go straight to the witches’ Sabbath. I myself respect them for it, and do not think that I could ever really love a woman who had not, at some time or other, been up on a broomstick. (Dinesen, SGT 87)

This directly makes a link between “emancipated women”, or feminists, and what was described in the earlier section as a witch. He refers to the lover who tried to poison him as a witch and, as we know from the former section, Nathalie turns out to be one as well – women who have, “at some time or other, been up on a broomstick”. It is emancipated women that the Baron likes and respects, therefore. The

29 idea of the women mentioned by the Baron going “straight to the witches’ Sabbath” is highly reminiscent of what Dinesen quotes Lady Colville, the friend who described the four types of women to her, saying in "Daguerreotypes”:

Women’s societies and women’s organizations could achieve far more, indeed would make shortcuts directly to their goals if, instead of forming committees, making speeches, and writing articles–all tame and simple imitations of men– they would let it be known the country over that they would meet on the heath and on the commons under a waning moon” (Dinesen, DG 36)

In the above quotation, Colville suggests that women could achieve the most by collecting under a “waning moon” – a moon phase often associated with the practise of witchcraft6. Both Lady Colville and the Baron establish, therefore, that feminists fall into the category of witches. A bit further on in his monologue, the Baron gives his thoughts on what the motives behind the witches’ actions were:

“But the jealousy of competition was, as between Adam and Lilith, a noble striving. So there you would find, not only the old witches of Macbeth, of whom one might have expected it, but even young ladies with faces smooth as flowers, wild and mad with jealousy of their lovers’ mustachios. All this they got from reading – in the orthodox witches’ manner – the book of Genesis backwards.” (Dinesen, DG 88)

It was therefore equality that the women were after, which manifested itself in the form of a competition against men. The above quotation contains three intertextual references in only three sentences that help illustrate this point. First is the competition between Adam and Lilith, which, according to Jewish folklore, is the story of Adam’s first wife Lilith (who, unlike Eve, was not made from Adam’s rib). Lilith leaves Adam after he expects her to be subservient, and refuses to return to the Garden of Eden. She has, therefore, become a figure embraced by many feminists. The second reference is to Macbeth’s three witches who, with their prophecies and wicked ways, represent evil, chaos and conflict in the play. To contrast these with young women with “faces smooth as flowers” is to say that not just evil and old, but also young and beautiful – those one might not expect it from – envy men for their moustaches and what these represent; every type of woman was susceptible to wanting to be more like a man. This drove women to read the book of Genesis – the story of Adam and Eve, the third reference – backwards: a reversal of roles in which Eve is given credit for giving birth to Adam instead of vice versa. This “orthodox witches’ manner” of seeing woman as a competitor of man reflects what Dinesen writes in “Oration” years later:

Perhaps the orthodox believers in the women’s movement might insist that one expresses contempt for a woman in assuming–so to speak agreeing– that she cannot execute as much as a man, cannot perform such great deed, cannot produce such concrete results as he. (Dinesen, DG 85).

6 According to Joanne Pearson’s Popular Dictionary of Paganism, a waning moon symbolises a "[p]eriod of time in which the moon passes from full to dark, associated with the crone or hag aspect of the godess" (150), where “hag“ is an Old English word for witch.

30

As mentioned in the overview of this essay, Dinesen herself expresses the view that women can be different to men in their own unique way whilst remaining equally, if not more, important (it is, after all, the tree that can give life, and not the motor). That the early feminists – or witches – mentioned by the Baron were jealous of their “lovers’ mustachios” reflects the part in of the essay in which Dinesen writes that the early feminists adopted a “costume which intellectually or psychologically represented a male” (Dinesen, DG 80). In order to get similar rights to those of men, women decided to be more like them:

They learned the most dignified ecclesiastical, medical, and legal jargons and demonstrated to what a large degree they were qualified for high office by adopting collars, neckties and cigars. Had they at the same time been able to acquire beards, it would have made their way even easier towards the pulpit, the laboratory, and the bench. (Dinesen, DG 80).

After this, Dinesen writes that times have changed, however, and that a woman can now be proud of her femininity and show the world “that she is a woman and no disguised rogue” (Dinesen, DG 80). This is because of the early feminists who “had to go through much and sacrifice more” and delivered “the first blow” (Dinesen, DG 79) for the generations that followed. Then, she writes something that again returns to the concept of reciprocity:

For those who have believed that femininity would grate in the pulpit and on the bench, it is worth observing that the male experts who have, as a matter of course, taken their places there have, driven as it were by a special instinct, willingly changed their appearance somewhat towards the womanly. Our clergyman’s robe with its white ruff is a beautiful and noble woman’s costume; the physician’s and housemother’s white coats have much in common; high ranking judges wear flowing robes when on the bench and in some countries enhance their dignity with long, curly wigs. (Dinesen, DG 84-85).

Here, Dinesen suggests that men have clearly been inspired by the opposite sex when it comes to dressing for important roles in order to “enhance their dignity” – not only have women attempted to be more like men, but also vice versa. With this, Dinesen “implies that men must dress as "women"– or that men must achieve a balance between the masculine and feminine principles – in order to make wise decisions and that both life forces are necessary for the fully integrated persona” (Stecher-Hansen 222). Near the end of his monologue that addresses the emancipation of woman, the Baron says:

I believe, though, that things have changed by now, and that at the present day, when males have likewise emancipated themselves, you may find the young lover on the hearth, following the track of the witch’s shadow along the ground, and, with infinitely less imagination, blending the deadly brew for his mistress, out of envy of her breasts. (Dinesen, SGT 89)

31 Saying that “males have likewise emancipated themselves” sounds paradoxical, as it is men that women had sought to emancipate themselves from in the first place. What this likely implies, however, is that men began to become used to, and inspired by, these emancipated women, and it was they who began to influence men; a shift had occurred from women envying men for their moustaches, to men wearing curly wigs and envying a young witch for her breasts. What I believe both the passage from “Oration” and the end of the Baron’s monologue are trying to tell us is that, after an initial time of rather militant feminism, a more balanced society of mutually inspired men and women with more evenly distributed rights has been achieved. This is in line with Dinesen’s passage from “Oration” in which she asks her readers if, after all that the early feminists have achieved for society, it is not now time to “lay down the weapons that they took up?” (Dinesen, DG 80). Though voiced officially for the first time in “Oration at a Bonfire, Fourteen Years Late”, Dinesen’s view on feminism appear to have been voiced years earlier by Baron von Brackel – a man surrounded by witches7. The Baron’s words will again be examined in the upcoming section, in which women, as symbols will be discussed.

7 Dinesen’s Letters from Africa were published posthumously in 1981. In these private letters, dating from 1914 to 1931, Dinesen already voices some of her ideas regarding feminism in letters to her aunt Mary Westenholz.

32 Chapter 6 – The Symbolic

6.1 The Importance of Symbols

Anyone familiar with Dinesen’s work will know that she pays great attention to detail – details that are often loaded with meanings. Indeed, about her own work, Dinesen said: “I am really quite extraordinarily conscientious as an artist! Many things I have rewritten fifty times. Will my potential readers have some sense of this, and will they, in that case, think it has been worth the trouble?” (Dinesen, Letters from Africa 87). For someone who rewrote some parts of her stories fifty times in order to get them right, it seems rather unlikely that, in Seven Gothic Tales, according to Dinesen,“[t]here is no meaning, and there should not be a meaning. It is dream. Fantasy!” (Rørdam 1). Fantastic, yes, but also full of meaning (as I hope to have shown by now). Much of what Dinesen lets her readers know, however, is not told directly, but disguised in the form of symbols. As Sara Stambaugh suggests in her article “Isak Dinesen Among the Victorians: Some Shared Symbolic Techniques”, Dinesen’s extensive use of symbols

stems from her position as an isolated woman in a world dominated by masculine values, a world in which she was strong enough to voice her resentment but not to proclaim it openly. Hoffmann, Carlyle, Dickens pointed the way towards disguise, a stylistic mask that could be used to hide the real purport of Dinesen's tales, which, more often than not, proclaim the value of women. (130)

This is a view I strongly agree with. After a discussion of the two techniques used by Dinesen to add “stylistic masks” to her work, I will go on to show how, in her essays as well as her stories, she (often self-reflexively) draws attention to the importance of these types of disguises. As, in Dinesen’s world, women have great symbolic significance, a more general discussion of Dinesen and her relationship with symbols will provide a useful foundation for the upcoming analyses in this chapter. In the above-mentioned essay, Stambaugh argues very convincingly that Dinesen “illustrates the reading of British Victorian literature and vice versa” (Dinesen Among the Victorians 115). That Dinesen was familiar with Victorian literature is well known, and proven in a letter she wrote to her aunt Mary Bess Westenholz in 1926, in which she writes: "Perhaps you will say that I do not know enough about the Victorians to express myself at all on them . . . There are some of them, however, Tennyson, Rossetti, and the Brontës, for example, that I think I probably know as well as you do" (Dinesen, Letters from Africa 236). It is Thomas Carlyle, however, who appeared to have had the most profound influence on Dinesen and her work. From 1833 to 1834, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh was published serially and became a highly influential work that “taught generations of British writers to write and readers to read” (Stambaugh, Dinesen Among the Victorians 116). As Stambaugh goes on to argue, the work “dictated a style of writing which held sway, in Britain at least, from the 1840s until the 1920s, when it fell from grace along with most else Victorian but remained alive and well in Isak Dinesen's fictional practice. This is one reason she can provide a

33 window to the past for students of Victorian literature” (116). That Dinesen was heavily influenced by Carlyle, and especially by his love for the symbolic, is demonstrated by a passage from her essay On Mottoes of My Life, in which she writes the following:

Very likely it will be difficult for the younger generation to realize to what extent we lived in a world of symbols. We might, at this moment, lay before us a plain matter-of-fact object, a piece of cloth, and endeavour to agree in defining and placing it. A young man or woman would say to me: "You may give this thing a name of your own choice, but actually, in reality and for all working purposes, it is a length of bunting, of such and such measurements and such and such colors, and worth so and so much a yard." The person brought up with symbols, genuinely surprised and shocked, would protest: "What do you mean? You are all wrong. The thing before us, in reality and for all working purposes, is a thing of tremendous power. Put it to a test in real, actual life – it can at any moment call up a hundred million people and set them marching. It is the Stars and Stripes, it is Old Glory, it is the United States of America." (Dinesen, DG 1-2)

According to Dinesen, young people who were not raised “in a world of symbols” see things more matter-of-factly than she herself and older generations: they see a flag as a piece of coloured cloth, when it can in fact be seen as a symbol for power and national pride that has caused millions to fight under it. This example of the symbolic as opposed to material value of a flag is highly reminiscent of a passage from Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus from 1833:

Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows'-meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they called their Flag; which, had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen? Did not the whole Hungarian Nation rise, like some tumultuous moon-stirred Atlantic, when Kaiser Joseph pocketed their Iron Crown; an implement, as was sagaciously observed, in size and commercial value little differing from a horse-shoe? It is in and through Symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works, and has his being: those ages, moreover, are accounted the noblest which can the best recognise symbolical worth, and prize it the highest. For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the Godlike? (222)

Both Dinesen and Carlyle use the example of a flag to demonstrate the power and importance of symbols. It seems very likely that Dinesen drew inspiration for this comparison from Carlyle’s work and way of thinking about the symbol. As Stambaugh states: Students of nineteenth century British literature are only beginning to realize how thoroughly Carlyle's precepts were followed and how central his injunctions were to the practice of writers like the Brontës, D.G. Rossetti, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, among many others, with whom I include Isak Dinesen, who stated her shared belief in the importance of the symbol.” (118)

Two of the injunctions used by these Victorian writers, and Dinesen, are public symbols and symbolic plots. A public symbol in literature is one that bears a commonly understood meaning, for example when a red-haired person symbolises a villain or a crow stands for death. Dinesen uses many of these in her tales. For example, she frequently compares women to birds, which was a common Victorian

34 symbol for a trapped being. The sisters Eliza and Fanny in “The Supper at Elsinore”, for example, “used to keep, in cages, the many birds presented to them by their seafaring admirers.” (Dinesen, SGT 217). Then, later on in the tale, Fanny is described as “a distinguished lady in furred boots”, who was, “in her own heart a great, mad, wing-clipped bird, fluttering in the winter sunset” (250). A very strong link is therefore made between the sisters and caged birds, stripped of their freedom. Symbolic plots, on the other hand, gain significance when the entire story is read as a symbol. Public symbols and symbolic plots are often used in conjunction. One good example for this is Dinesen’s “The Monkey”. In this tale, the individual details and the plot must be read symbolically, for, as Stambaugh writes,

[h]ow can the reader accept the transformation of monkey and prioress at the climax of that story without recognizing the monkey as a traditional symbol of lust and thus realizing that it represents the sexuality of the old prioress, the part of her usually repressed under her staid habit but, like caged African elephants, now and then rampant? Thus plot action in conjunction with traditional symbol has been used to make a symbolic statement.” (Isak Dinesen Among the Victorians 126)

Apart from using public symbols and symbolic plots, symbols can be found elsewhere in Dinesen’s tales. For example, in “The Deluge at Nordeney”, “Malin Nat-og-Dag’s name (Night-and-Day) invokes the theme of contrast that runs through the entire story” (Brantly 26). Similarly, her companion Calypso who, in “The Deluge at Norderney”, harbours great feminine power, is named after a nymph who holds Odysseus prisoner to her charms for seven years; knowledge of Homer’s Odyssey can therefore be applied by the reader to better understand what sort of person Calypso is and represents. Symbols are, therefore, abundant in Dinesen’s work in several different forms. Robert Langbaum, author of Isak Dinesen's Art: The Gayety of Vision, recalls the following from an encounter with the author: “In explaining to me the difference between the novel and the story as she conceived it, she said that in the novel all kinds of details are there simply to give a sense of reality, but in a story every detail—a letter, a handkerchief […] must bear directly on the action and meaning” (210). For Dinesen, who wrote stories instead of novels, every detail mattered and served the story in some way; the rewriting of certain texts fifty times therefore becomes more logical. Stambaugh reads Dinesen's emphasis upon the significance of details as “yet another indication of her allegiance to romance, here to the power and importance of the image dropped, apparently at random, into her narratives but always bearing symbolic weight in relation to the story” (Isak Dinesen Among the Victorians 120). Though written in Denmark in the 20th century, Dinesen’s literature is clearly influenced by her Victorian and romantic predecessors. What Dinesen also does, however, is write about symbols in a perhaps more postmodern way than the writers who inspired her. She does this by addressing the idea, and importance, of the symbol in a more direct, self-reflexive manner; a characteristic I will now go on to discuss. When, in “The Deluge at Norderney”, Malin Nat-og-Dag tells the rest of the company the story of

35 Calypso’s past, Calypso’s reaction to the part of the story in which she resolves to cut off her own hair and breasts in order to rid herself of femininity is as follows:

At this point of Miss Malin’s narrative, the girl, who had hitherto stared straight in front of her, turned her wild eyes toward the narrator, and began to listen with a new kind of interest, as if she herself were hearing the tale for the first time. Miss Malin had an opulent power of imagination. But still the story, correct or not, was to the heroine herself a symbol, a dressed-up image of what she had in reality gone through, and she acknowledged it by her clear deep glance at the old woman. (Dinesen, SGT 46)

The above passage describes an idea that is central romanticism and Carlyle’s injunctions: that a story can, or should, be a “symbol, dressed up image” of reality, and that the facts need not necessarily be true as long as the desired point is put across. The fact that Miss Malin has an “opulent power of imagination” and Calypso listens to the story as if hearing it for the first time suggests that the story is made up, but Calypso acknowledges it for correctly capturing, emotionally, what she had to go through in her youth, which is all that matters. Here, the author directly suggests the purpose of the symbol. Another example from Seven Gothic Tales in which Dinesen directly addresses the symbol is in “The Poet”, when the Councilor and Fransine go to meet Anders Kube, the poet, in order to talk to him about his inappropriate behaviour the night before. In order to “protect [him] against evil eyes”, Fransine gives Anders an amulet that had been given to her by her grandmother: “It was a little piece of coral, formed like a horn, such as the plain people of Italy use as a talisman” (Dinesen, SGT 395). The moment Anders takes the amulet from Fransine, it becomes obvious that the two are falling in love:

Anders took the little amulet from her. As their hands met, they both grew very pale […] From his place on the sofa, the Councilor could see with the corner of his eye that great forces were in play. And he saw plainly that his bride gave to the young clerk, as some sort of symbol, what looked like a little pair of horns. With this, were it more or less than he had expected, he had to be content, and he and Fransine walked down the stair, arm in arm, to where Kresten was waiting for them with the carriage. (Dinesen, SGT 395)

In this passage, an amulet that was first described as “a little piece of coral, formed like a horn” becomes, seen through the eyes of the Councilor, a “sort of symbol, [that] looked like a little pair of horns”. Of course, a pair of horns is easily associated with the devil, or at least a dangerous animal like an ox; it is a public symbol for a threat. This shows the nature of symbols: to one person an amulet can symbolise an innocent horn-shaped lucky charm, a present from one’s grandmother, whereas for another it signals the beginning of a threatening relationship, brought about by “great forces”. Another characteristic of the symbol is addressed in “The Old Chevalier”, when Baron von Brackel begins to describe the symbolic significance of women and their clothes (a subject I will come back to in more detail later in this chapter). As the diegetic narrator recounts, von Brackel tells him the following before going on to describe women’s clothing:

36 To you young people who laugh at the ideas, as at the bustles, of the ’seventies, and who will tell me that in spite of all our artificiality there can have been but, little mystery left to any of us, may I be allowed to say that you do not, perhaps, quite understand the meaning of the word? Nothing is mysterious until it symbolizes something. The bread and wine of the church itself has to be baked and bottled, I suppose. (Dinesen, SGT 94)

The above passage begins with a point very similar to that made by Dinesen in her Carlyle-inspired passage from “On Mottoes of My Life” mentioned earlier: “Very likely it will be difficult for the younger generation to realize to what extent we lived in a world of symbols” (Dinesen, DG 1-2). Von Brackel talks about the current generation being unable to understand the concept of mystery and its dependence on the symbol. Similarly to the idea of the flag being a piece of cloth that becomes a powerful symbol when it stands for a country, von Brackel points out that before bread and wine symbolise the body of Christ in a church, they must be baked and bottled the same way as any other food and wine; only when symbolic meaning is attached to these ordinary things can they be mysterious (or, in the case of the flag, stand for great power). Further on in the narrator’s recount of von Brackel’s monologue, he continues:

Do you remember the scholars of the Middle Ages who discussed the question of which had been created first: the idea of a dog, or the individual dogs? To you, who are taught statistics in your kindergartens, there is no doubt, I suppose. And it is but justice to say that your world does in reality look as if it had been made experimentally. But to us even the ideas of old Mr. Darwin were new and strange. We had our ideas from such undertakings as symphonies and ceremonials of court, and had been brought up with strong feelings about the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate birth. (Dinesen, SGT 95)

This passage again differentiates between an older and a younger generation: whereas von Brackel and his generation learned from less scientific and more artistic things such as symphonies and ceremonies, the younger generation learn statistics at an early age and take Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution for granted – they are a lot more logical and cannot help but see their world as a product of (scientific) experimentation. As a continuation of what von Brackel said earlier about younger people being unable to grasp the concept of mystery and the symbolic as well as his generation, the above passage echoes the same feeling toward the symbolic as what Dinesen writes in “On Mottoes of My Life”: that, unfortunately, the symbol is losing its power in light of a new, more logical age (DG 2). Perhaps this is Dinesen’s way of giving the reader a meta-fictional justification for using an out-dated writing style – Victorian literature inspired by Carlyle– that embraces the symbol. That a more abstract approach to life need not necessarily be a more unrealistic one, according to Dinesen, is explained in “Daguerreotypes”:

Who is closest to reality–he who, seeing the tricolor, exclaims “There is France,” or he who exclaims, “There are five meters of red, blue, and white cloth?” To me personally it seems as if human intelligence never has taken a more decisive step than when, instead of counting the concrete numbers one, two, three, four, it began operating with abstract quantitites – a and b, x and y. The concrete sums one can count up – they are what they are,

37 they are tangible “to take hold and feel”; the symbols are universally valid. (Dinesen, DG 50)

Like in “On Mottoes of My Life”, Dinesen uses the idea of a flag to show what, according to her, the most logical way of seeing the world is: that what something represents can be more important that what it actually is. This concept can also be applied to mathematics, for example, in which the abstract, universally valid quantities represented by symbols – a, b, x and y – are the cleverer option. With this, Dinesen seems to suggest that symbols are anything but out-dated and still relevant in modern times dominated by knowledge and logic. Having now shown that Dinesen was an avid user of, and advocate for, symbols in the style of her Victorian predecessors (as shown in both Seven Gothic Tales and her essays), I will now go on to show how tightly the women in Dinesen’s writing were bound to the symbolic. I shall do so by first demonstrating how women themselves were portrayed as symbols, before moving on to discuss the symbolic significance of their clothing, and lastly women as (symbols for) works of art.

6.2 Women as Symbols

As the previous sections have shown, women play a major role in Dinesen’s literature. What we have also seen is that the typically Victorian practise of integrating symbols into one’s literature using various techniques was adopted, and explicitly embraced, by Dinesen. As can be expected, then, Dinesen’s writing is full of symbols related to women: they symbolise things and things symbolise them. Indeed, we have already seen that the witch is a symbol for a certain emancipated, ideal woman. This section deals more directly with what Dinesen writes about women in relation to the symbol and the symbolic. As stated in the overview of the essay “Oration at a Bonfire, Fourteen Years Late”, Dinesen writes that Meïr Aron Goldschmidt is “wiser than [her]self” when it comes to explaining the difference between men and women (DG 85). She then goes on to quote him: “Seeing her, one does not ask her name, class, or profession, for she is herself woman and has within herself all that is essential. Let a man step forth, on the other hand, even the most excellent–the more excellent he is, the more we must ask, in what does he excel?” (Dinesen, DG 85)8. This idea was already expressed by (the diegetic narrator’s recollection of) Baron von Brackel, again when he holds his monologue about women of the past:

The women of those days were more than a collection of individuals. They symbolized, or represented, Woman. I understand that the word itself, in that sense, has gone out of the language. Where we talked of woman – pretty cynically, we liked to think – you talk of women, and all the difference lies there […]. The idea of Woman – of das ewig weibliche [sic], about which you yourself will not deny that there is some mystery – had to us been created in the beginning, and our women made it their mission to represent it worthily, as I

8 Dinesen does not provide a source for this quotation and I could not locate it myself. It is likely her own translation of a lesser known Danish text.

38 suppose the mission of the individual dog must have been worthily to represent the Creator’s idea of a dog. (Dinesen, SGT 94-95)

The idea expressed in this passage is very similar to that expressed by Dinesen in “Oration” when she quotes Goldschmidt: that of women representing an essence that is “Woman” (DG 85). Von Brackel mentions “das ewig Weibliche” (the eternal feminine), which is a concept popularised by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in part II of Faust, published (posthumously) in 1832. It is a philosophical principle that idealises an unchanging archetype of “woman”, and asserts that men and women have different core “essences” that cannot be altered by time or the environment (Abraham 207). The essence of woman was generally associated with the following virtues: "Modesty, gracefulness, purity, delicacy, civility, compliancy, reticence, chastity, affability, [and] politeness" (Gilbert and Gubar 23). The concept was particularly present in 19th century culture, when an image of women as angelic beings who put men on the right spiritual and moral path was particularly popular (Oppel 7). In Goethe’s Faust, then, the author presents “women from penitent prostitutes to angelic virgins in [a] role of interpreters or intermediaries between the divine father and his human sons”. Although she had favourable attributes, Goethe’s woman was dependent on, and only relevant because of, man. In addition, for Goethe, “the ideal of contemplative purity is always feminine, while the ideal of significant action is masculine” (Gilbert and Gubar 21) – the same idea expressed by Dinesen in “Oration”. Though undoubtedly inspired by the patriarchal views of 19th century writers such as Goethe and Goldschmidt regarding women and das ewig Weibliche, Dinesen expressed their ideas alongside more feminist ones, such as the importance of the witch. Von Brackel – as seen in this thesis’ section on feminism – says the following about emancipated women: “I myself respect them for it, and do not think that I could ever really love a woman who had not, at some time or other, been up on a broomstick” (Dinesen, SGT 87). Seen in this context, von Brackel’s notion of the eternal feminine becomes more of a unique characteristic of a woman, rather than something that necessarily defines her in relation to man; whereas Goethe’s woman was an intermediary between God and man, von Brackel’s could step onto a broom and escape the clutches of man. A more complex, progressive view of the das ewig Weibliche is thus provided by Dinesen. Two other aspects of women add to their symbolic power as Woman: their clothes and ability to become a work of art – ideas I will now move on to discuss.

39 6.3 The Power of Suggestion – Women and Their Clothes

For most women it is insufferable to sit in a room if the color scheme displeases them. In the same way, clothes play a greater role for a woman than for a man. It is said that women adorn themselves for men or that they adorn themselves for one another, but I think that neither is quite true. A woman’s clothes are for her an extension of her own being. (Dinesen, DG 75-76)

In the above passage, taken from “Oration at a Bonfire, Fourteen Years Late”, Dinesen once again points out what is, according to her, a key difference between men and women: whereas most men pay little attention to materialistic things such as clothes and interiors, for women it is an inseparable part of who they are. Therefore, what may sound like a gross generalisation to some is, according to Dinesen, an essential part of being a woman. As already established, women embody das ewig Weibliche, and her clothing contributes to this. It does so by concealing her body in an artful way, disguising what is underneath and lending her an aura of mystery. Dinesen’s ideas on this matter seem to have been influenced by her father, for, in “Daguerreotypes”, she writes:

In my father’s book, Boganis’s Letters from the Hunt, he writes, “It is all very well when ladies are on guard duty but it will be no good when they decide to hunt on foot with guns over their shoulders. However charming a girl’s well-formed calf can be when revealed by a carelessly lifted dress, there is nothing at all attractive about chopped-off skirts that show the entire leg up to the knee.” “For,” he adds, “the secret of a woman’s strength lies in suggestion.” (Dinesen, DG 27)

This seems very similar to the attitude expressed by Dinesen’s uncle when she writes about how atrocious he found it to see women on bicycles, bearing their legs. Though perhaps less conservatively (for she liked to ride her bicycle, for example)9, Dinesen seems to agree with the older males in her family regarding (at least some) views on women. In her essay “Rungstedlund: A Radio Address”, Dinesen writes the following about her father: “I was ten years old when my father died. His death was for me a great sorrow, of a kind which probably only children feel. I think I was his favorite child, and I know he thought I resembled him” (Dinesen, DG 206). Therefore, “[a]s a result of her identification with her father, the values she embraces are likely associated with a masculine system, the belief in risks, or in the grand gesture” (Stambaugh, Witch as Quintessential Woman 94). Indeed, Dinesen’s first pen name was Osceola, the Indian name of her father’s dog, and her house in Africa was initially called Bogani House in tribute to his pen name, Boganis (Migel 29). It is because of this heavy influence that Wilhelm Dinesen and his work had on his daughter that “the idealized values she associated with him permeate her work” (Stambaugh, Witch as Quintessential Woman 94).

9 When, in Daguerreotypes, Dinesen describes how, when she was a child, her uncle disagreed with women riding bicycles, she writes the following: “Though I had just been given my first bicycle, I swallowed my indignation in silence“ (Dinesen, DG 24).

40 Returning to the subject of women’s clothing, Dinesen affirms her father’s words by again quoting one of her favourite authors:

In his novel Homeless, Meïr Goldschmidt gives a kind of poetic explanation of [why a woman loses her nobility when revealing too much skin] when he writes, “The theory is, that men are made of stuff that doesn’t show spots, whereas women are made of white silk.” But modern young people will perhaps not be satisfied with a poetic explanation; they demand a straightforward answer. The exhibitor of daguerreotypes is forced to reply: “I am not able to give a straightforward explanation. The relationship was per se poetic. Woman’s nobility was contained in woman’s mystery. That is the strength of the eternal feminine: suggestion.” (Dinesen, DG 28-29)

As “[t]he exhibitor of daguerreotypes”, Dinesen, though writing about what men of former generations thought about women and their clothing, seems to align herself with this view. In the above quotation she also explicitly uses the term eternal feminine – the English translation of what Baron von Brackel says is a distinct quality of Woman. It is also the fictional von Brackel who, seventeen years before the publication of “Dageurreotypes”, expresses similar ideas regarding women and their clothes:

The old Baron von Brackel made a long pause. “I think that I must explain to you,” he said, “so that you may be able to understand this tale aright, that to undress a woman was then a very different thing from what it must be now. What are the clothes that your ladies of these days are wearing? In themselves as little as possible – a few perpendicular lines, cut off again before they have had time to develop any sense. There is no plan about them. They exist for the sake of the body, and have no career of their own, or, if they have any mission at all, it is to reveal. “But in those days a woman’s body was a secret which her clothes did their utmost to keep. We would walk about in the streets in bad weather in order to catch a glimpse of an ankle, the sight of which must be as familiar to you young men of the present day as the stems of these wineglasses of ours. Clothes then had a being, an idea of their own. With a serenity that it was not easy to look through, they made it their object to transform the body which they encircled, and to create a silhouette so far from its real form as to make it a mystery which it was a divine privilege to solve. The long tight stays, the whalebones, skirts and petticoats, bustle and draperies, all that mass of material under which the women of my day were buried where they were not laced together as tightly as they could possibly stand it – all aimed at one thing: to disguise.” (Dinesen, SGT 93-94).

Even though a lot of his characteristics are portrayed by Dinesen as less than admirable (for example because he sees Nathalie as an object for his own selfish needs), she uses von Brackel to express the ideas of former generations regarding women; ideas that she herself seems to have agreed with. Indeed, Dinesen herself is said to have been a vain person with a “desire to charm and conquer, which was even more essential to her than to other women” (Migel 130) – something that undoubtedly required the right attire. In Dinesen’s world, then, a woman is a powerful symbol and her clothing, which is not an asset but a part her, is in itself a symbol that completes her. As already mentioned in the overview of “Oration”, Dinesen writes that whereas men are capable of being artists by creating works of art, women are artists in a different way: they become works of art themselves. The upcoming section will shed light on how, in Seven Gothic Tales, and later in her essays, she portrayed women as symbols of art.

41

6.4 Women as Art

A peculiar relationship exists between artists and women. Goethe said that a woman’s nature is closely bound up with art and it is certainly true that the average woman is more of an artist than the average man. But few women have been great artists save in those areas where they do no create a work of art but can themselves be said to become works of art – that is, as actresses, singers or dancers. These have strongly inspired their public in a way a woman painter or woman writer cannot do. I think that, as far as I’m concerned, were I a man, it would be out of the question for me to fall in love with a woman writer; indeed, I think that if I had met and felt myself powerfully attracted to a woman, the information that she was a writer would cool my ardour. (Dinesen, DG 77)

In line with what Dinesen writes in “Oration” about men being the sex that does and women the sex that is, the above passage shows what, according to her, the difference between male and female artists has been in the past. Whereas men painted and wrote, women danced, sang and acted – men made art, women were art. Though she speaks of the past, Dinesen seems to support this notion by saying that, were she a man, she would not be attracted to female writers; this is, coming from a female writer, of course a highly self-reflexive comment that may be meant ironically. The idea is, then, somewhat of a paradox. On the one hand, it can be read as a compliment that women have the ability to be considered a work of art. On the other hand, this may be seen as promoting the objectification of women and gender inequality. However, similarly to das ewig Weibliche and uncomfortable corsets being a part of Woman, Dinesen seems to promote a more woman-friendly version of the views expressed by the men of older generations. As the upcoming example will show, Dinesen, on several occasions, compares women to delicate, beautiful beings in her fiction – as true works of art. It is again Baron von Brackel who, in his monologue, makes several references to fine art while talking about women. After describing the symbolic power of women’s clothing and its purpose to disguise, he continues with the following:

“Out of a tremendous froth of trains, pleatings, lace, and flounces which waved and undulated, secundum artem, at every movement of the bearer, the waist would shoot up like the chalice of a flower, carrying the bust, high and rounded as a rose, but imprisoned in whalebone up to the shoulder […]. A woman was then a work of art, the product of centuries of civilization, and you talked of her figure as you talked of her salon, with the admiration which one gives to the achievement of a skilled and untiring artist. […] You could follow, then, the development of this idea in a little girl, as she was growing up and was gradually, no doubt in accordance with very ancient rules, inaugurated into the rites of the cult, and finally ordained. Slowly the center of gravity of her being would be shifted from individuality to symbol, and you would be met with that particular pride and modesty characteristic of the representative of the great powers – such as you may find again in a really great artist. Indeed, the haughtiness of the pretty young girl, or the old ladies’ majesty, existed no more on account of personal vanity, or on any personal account whatever, than did the pride of Michelangelo himself, or the Spanish Ambassador to France. (Dinesen, SGT 93-95)

42 In the days of von Brackel’s youth, a woman was “a work of art”, comparable to the achievement of an “untiring artist” 10. Through “centuries of civilization” women, when old enough, were inaugurated into a symbolic cult that held great powers: being a woman. The vanity of women could, then, be compared to the pride of Michelangelo – one of the greatest artists of the High Renaissance. As Marianne Stecher- Hansen writes in her essay “Karen Blixen on Feminism and Womanliness”, this passage

is significant in that women's creativity as a means of expression is equated with that of the artist's but also because women's appearance is so obviously historicized and represented as a cultural construction, "the product of centuries of civilization." Through the narrative perspective of the nostalgic Baron, women come to represent not individuals but cultural symbols. (Stecher-Hansen 219)

Though to some –especially feminists– this categorisation may sound degrading towards women, Dinesen appeared to admire this cultural symbol. In a letter she sent to her aunt Mary Bess Westenholz in 1926, Dinesen writes:

I think that women of the old days, and especially the best of them, felt themselves to be representatives of something great and sacred, by virtue of which they possessed importance outside themselves and could feel great pride and dignity, and toward which they had a weighty responsibility. Neither the arrogance of the young and beautiful girl or the majesty of the old lady way, after all, felt on their own behalf; they were without any element of personal vanity, but were borne as something to take, a shield or a banner. Where a personal affront might well be pardoned, a violation of that womanliness whose representatives they were could never be forgiven. (Dinesen, Letters from Africa 336)

In this letter, Dinesen seems very much in favour of the “representatives of womanliness” from days past. “The best” women, according to her, “possessed importance outside themselves”, referring to how they presented, carried and behaved themselves. The “centuries of civilization” that von Brackel talks about, therefore, produced a type of dignified woman who takes pride in her being. It is interesting to note the similarity between the following two sentences in particular: Neither the arrogance of the young and beautiful girl or the majesty of the old lady way, after all, felt on their own behalf; they were without any element of personal vanity, but were borne as something to take, a shield or a banner. (Dinesen, Letters from Africa 336).

Indeed, the haughtiness of the pretty young girl, or the old ladies’ majesty, existed no more on account of personal vanity, or on any personal account whatever, than did the pride of Michelangelo himself, or the Spanish Ambassador to France. (Dinesen, SGT 93-95)

As the above sentences show, it is rather undeniable that Dinesen took ideas from her 1926 letter to her aunt, and expressed these through the fictional Baron von Brackel, years later in Seven Gothic Tales.

10 There a more examples of this in Seven Gothic Tales, but the one used above is the most striking and similar to the ones used in Dinesen’s essays. Another interesting example is how von Brackel describes Nathalie’s body during his sexual encounter with her: “I had before me the greatest masterpiece of nature that my eyes have ever been privileged to rest upon, a sight to take away your breath. […] All her body shone in the light, delicately rounded and smooth as marble” (Dinesen, SGT 97).

43 Unless she was lying to her aunt, then, Dinesen felt that women should represent the womanly – they should be proud, vain, and stand for “something great and sacred” (Dinesen, Letters from Africa 336). Pretty young girls as well as majestic old ladies owe it to themselves and fellow women to be proud representatives of their gender. Returning to von Brackel’s description of women as symbols, this is precisely his point: “The idea of Woman – of das ewig Weibliche, about which you yourself will not deny that there is some mystery – had to us been created in the beginning, and our women made it their mission to represent it worthily” (Dinesen, SGT 94). What Dinesen seems to be doing quite actively is endorsing what Judith Butler calls “gender performativity”11. In her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Butler argues that within a society things like actions, behaviours, rituals, speech utterances, rules and dress codes produce what we perceive as masculine and feminine identities. Rather than being biological, then, gender is a social construction that “proves to be performative—that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed” (Butler 34). It is this categorisation that enables sexism and inequality. Therefore, Butler calls for “gender trouble”, for the idea of gender to be troubled through performance (Butler xxiv)12. With her reinforcement of traditional gender roles –for example that something like the eternal feminine exists and that women should be representatives of it– Dinesen can therefore be seen as contributing to a divide that is harmful to those who do not neatly fit into patriarchal, heterosexual gender categories. In her fiction as well as her non-fiction, Dinesen extensively writes about, and uses, symbols to convey important points which, to once again quote Stambaugh, “more often than not, proclaim the value of women” (Stambaugh, Isak Dinesen Among the Victorians 130). Though often borrowing from men’s patriarchal view of women, Dinesen shows her readers what she perceives to be their positive sides. Though strongly believing in a woman’s rights to pursue what she wants in life and be seen as man’s equally important counterpart, she seems to cherish Woman for what she represents in society and culture. In the complex, symbolic world of Dinesen, a woman can be simultaneously emancipated and a beautifully dressed, mysterious work of art.

11 Butler published her groundbreaking book in 1990, so Dinesen did not know about the subject of “gender trouble“ herself. Butler’s theories can easily be applied to Dinesen’s work, however. 12 In Gender Trouble, Butler uses the example of drag performances in order to demonstrate a disruption of the “very distinctions between the natural and the artificial, depth and surface, inner and outer through which discourse about genders almost always operates” (x). As the performance of drag is a reversal of one’s “true” gender, it questions what it means to be masculine or feminine and troubles gender as an essential characteristic of the self.

44 Conclusion

As we have seen is chapter three, the witch “embodies the characteristics Dinesen associated with ideal womanhood: friendship with other women, masculine independence, the rebelliousness associated with Lucifer, housewifely skills, seductiveness, and a strong attraction to men’’ (Stambaugh, Witch as Quintessential Woman 2). As for the relationship between a man and a woman, “mutual inspiration” is the key to a functioning society; a society that would benefit from a shift from doing to being (more feminine, therefore). What Dinesen has shown us by including these thoughts in Seven Gothic Tales as well as her essays is that she places great value on women, their rights and ways. On the other and, she endorses more male-influenced, patriarchal notions of femininity; views that she does not describe as damaging to her gender, but appears to see as something positive. For example, she promotes the views of the men of older generations who thought that the noble, mysterious nature of women must be respected and preserved; a view that cements existing gender categories. A complex attitude regarding women, caught between patriarchal and feminist views, is thus expressed in Dinesen’s work. Like the women who dare not reveal too much skin in order to preserve their nobility, Dinesen is fond of disguises. Using pen names, tales within tales and unreliable narrators to name a few, she uses several methods to undermine her narrative authority and keep readers asking themselves: “Who is she, and what does she mean?” Baron von Brackel is neither reliable nor particularly likable, and yet he is the character who echoes Dinesen’s “own” words –those from her essays– the most. This way, she can put her points across without being too direct, and without being able to be held (fully) accountable for it. After all, “[t]he secret of woman’s strength lies in suggestion” (Dinesen, DG 27). Dinesen wrote the three essays analysed in this thesis in 1951, 1953 and 1960, when she had been an established author, with a large following, for many years. This means that she had enough freedom, and influence, to voice her opinions in the form of essays and be sure that they would find a large audience. As she was unknown to the world while writing Seven Gothic Tales, there was neither demand nor an audience for her personal opinions. This means that, if she wanted the world to hear her thoughts, it would have had to be inconspicuously. And, for this, Seven Gothic Tales and its characters seems to have offered the perfect disguise; a Trojan horse for the thoughts of one of the 20th century’s most extraordinary minds. What I have done with this thesis is analyse and compare Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales with the non-fiction that came after it, in order to highlight her recurring ideas regarding women. In 1981, Letters from Africa was published, which contains the private letters that Dinesen had written to, and received from, her friends and family between 1914 and 1931. Made available to the public for the first time, these letters provided a never-before-seen insight into Dinesen’s life and times in Africa. A similar research to the one I have offered, but focused on which of the ideas expressed in Seven Gothic Tales

45 had been expressed prior to it, would be an interesting, and valuable, addition to the body of work surrounding Dinesen13. At the end of the last of the Seven Gothic Tales, “The Poet”, Fransine lifts a stone above the fatally injured Councilor’s head, cries “You poet!”, and flings it down at his head (420). The story, and therefore book’s, last sentence is the following: “And meanwhile, from all sides, like an echo in the engulfing darkness, winding and rolling in long caverns, her last word was repeated again and again” (Dinesen, SGT 420). I would like to think that Dinesen chose this ending to her first book very carefully – as a way of foreshadowing that her own words, “like an echo in the engulfing darkness”, will be “repeated again and again”.

13 I have already provided an example for this in chapter 6, where I show that a passage that Dinesen had written to her aunt in 1926 had been rewritten for a part of von Brackel’s monologue about women in “The Old Chevalier”.

46 Bibliography

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47 Modern Fiction Studies 36.4, 1990. 640-641. Rørdam, Valdemar. “Interview med Karen Blixen”. Berlingske Tidende, 16 May 1934. Shakespeare, William, and Eugene M. Waith. The Tragedy of Macbeth. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954 Stambaugh, Sara. “Isak Dinesen Among the Victorians: Some Shared Symbolic Techniques”. Isak Dinesen and Narrativity. Ed. Gurli A. Woods. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994. – – –. “Witch as Quintessential Woman: A Context for Isak Dinesen’s Fiction.” Mosaic 16, no. 3 (1983): 87–100. Stecher-Hansen, Marianne. "Karen Blixen on Feminism and Womanliness: "en Baaltale Med14 Aars Forsinkelse"." Scandinavian Studies. 83.2 (2011): 191-232. Stevenson, Robert L. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Raleigh, N.C: Alex Catalogue, 1990 Thurman, Judith. Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller. New York: St Martin's Press, 1982. Vidi. “Interview med Isak Dinesen”. Politiken, 1 May 1934. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Charlottesville, Va: University of Virginia Library, 1993. Woods, Gurli A. Isak Dinesen and Narrativity: Reassessments for the 1990s. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994.

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